Nobel Laureate mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has said that the present universe did not start with the Big Bang and that there was another universe before the present one.

Traces of the older universe can be discovered in present black holes and certain electromagnetic radiation spots in the sky, Penrose, said in his address at a virtual meet at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics here from Oxford on Monday.

"There was actually another universe existing before the present one and the Big Bang merely marked the end of that universe. Evidence of that previous universe can still be observed these days," he said.

In a similar way this universe will be succeeded by another after millions of years with the mark of the current universe left in black holes, Penrose, who is currently associated with Oxford University and is a contemporary of Stephen Hawking, said elucidating the theory of the "conformal cyclic cosmology" which talks of the infinite cycles surrounding the universe and Big Bang.

He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on black holes.

The nonagenarian Nobel laureate had been Stephen Hawking's collaborator and discovered among other areas the cycle of time, a breakthrough of perpetual evolution of our universe from one aeon to another.?

Subir Sarkar, the senior professor of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology at Oxford, Larry McLerran, leading physicist of US field Quark Gluon Plasma (US) and Sushanta Duttagupta, the founder director of IISER and former Visva Bharati Vice-chancellor were the key participants at the three-day meet which started on May 9.

Head of the ALICE detector at CERN, Bikash Sinha and his team were present at the meet called Macrocosmos, Microcosmos, Accelerator and Philosophy 2020 organised by Tagore Centre for Natural Sciences and Philosophy (TCNSP), Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics.?