Julian Barbour, a visiting professor of physics at the University of Oxford, says that these circles would be "remarkable if real and sensational if they confirm Penrose's theory". They would, he says, "overthrow the standard inflationary picture", which, he adds, has become widely accepted as scientific fact by many cosmologists. But he believes that the result will be "very controversial" and that other researchers will look at the data very critically. He says there are many disputable aspects to the theory