Eh, this is just a blog post that says "me and another guy think the universe is cyclical" with no further information.
He does repeat how brave they are to look beyond the big bang, though. Whatever that means.
rips sick bong hit
Soooo like I was saying...
Edit: to be fair to the author, the article IS written by a cosmologist from Brown and he is honest about the speculative nature of the article.
I just spent 5 minutes on Google because I misread your first line as 'rips sock bong hit' and I was trying to figure out what the hell a sock bong was.
That is fair. I just don't see it as something worth highlighting. It's basically a click bait article.
I am glad someone is finally brave enough to look past the big bang though.
One idea that captures my imagination is the concept of cyclic inflation – a framework that combines cosmic inflation with the notion of cyclic collapse and expansion, or bounces.
This captivating idea, conceived by former postdoctoral researcher Dr Tirthabir Biswas and myself, suggests that the Universe undergoes infinite cycles of collapse and expansion.
Here's a link to the good professor's paper for those interested. As others have already pointed out, cyclic universe as an idea is not new -- the paper itself cited refs 11-19 as prior art, the oldest of which dated back to 1931.
The claim the good professor is trying to make is somewhat subtle for any lay person skimming through the article: the novelty of their idea is not cyclicity itself, but rather to combine cyclicity and inflation. To be honest, as a lay person I would have thought a cycle would consist of an inflationary period and a deflationary period, so forgive me for not seeing the point! The following technical statement from the paper perhaps makes more sense:
Thus although cyclic and inflationary models are not mutually exclusive, it is natural to try to attempt to replace inflation altogether with “cyclicity”. In this paper, however, we take a slightly different approach, by exploring whether by embedding inflation in a cyclic universe setting, some of it’s problems viz. (i-iv) can be alleviated. Our main idea is to merge inflation with cyclic cosmology where the universe undergoes an infinite number of cycles before bouncing into a final power-law inflationary phase.
I think the better way to say this is that not only do you get inflation (and deflation) for free within each cycle, but the sequence of cycles is itself inflating -- a larger scale inflation modulated by a smaller scale periodic function if you will.
The question now is, of course, is there a "first cycle", and what happened before it. Why stop there and not have some meta-cycles? That would bring the whole business to a full circle.
Probably there was a universe before, and God just got so tired of humans that he nuked them. :)
You should watch Mother! if you haven't already. That's basically the plot. (except nature is the one that gets tired of people)
I have, really good movie. :) Feels like a lot of people missed that one. It's great.
This isn’t a new theory at all, this was first proposed not long after the BBT was.
Exactly. Before dark matter/energy were discovered to be accelerating expansion. There was a prevailing/plausible theory that the universe may endlessly cycle through Singularity > Big bang > Expansion > Contraction > Singularity > Big bang etc due to gravity.