Far out cosmology: bouncng cyclical universe (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, July 11, 2016, 23:24 (3055 days ago) @ David Turell

This theory has been around for some time. Steinhardt and Turok produced a paper on it in 2002. It's back:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2096622-our-universe-could-be-reborn-as-a-bouncing-baby-cosmos/-"The universe could bounce through its own demise and emerge unscathed. A new “big bounce” model shows how the universe could shrink to a point and grow again, using just the cosmic ingredients we know about now.-***- “'Inflation is the champion until dethroned,” says Robert Caldwell at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.-"But there have always been alternative models to compete with inflation. One major contender is the “big bounce” model, in which our universe rose from the ashes of an earlier cosmos that ended in a “big crunch”, a process set to repeat when the universe comes to an end. Those models have also struggled to explain the singularity, though.-“'The bouncing models until this point had to add extra ingredients or assumptions in order to make sense of how the universe got through or avoided the singularity,” says Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.-"In a new paper, Turok and Steffen Gielen at Imperial College London take a different approach. “The spirit of our work is to focus on simplicity,” Turok says. “We're not adding bells and whistles to the physics we already know.”-"The pair focused on a principle from particle physics: the idea that, at very high energies, matter behaves like light. In particular, it becomes scale-invariant - the equations that describe its behaviour are the same no matter the energy of the light, or the size of universe that contains it. (my bold)-“'The universe can shrink to zero and reappear, and the light is none the wiser,” Turok says. “That's roughly speaking what happens.”-"Turok and Gielen applied that principle to a universe that is completely smooth and the same in all directions - not exactly realistic, but that allowed them to write down the equations governing this universe and solve them exactly.-"The solution predicts a cosmos that bounces through the singularity in a process similar to quantum tunnelling, which allows electrons to pass through walls or other barriers.-“'It's completely unambiguous: it goes through the crunch and out in a bang,” Turok says.-“'This is potentially pretty exciting,” Caldwell says. “They have figured out a way to evolve through a bounce without introducing any funny matter. I think it's an important step to developing a theory of the early universe that doesn't resort to inflation.”-"The idea is interesting, says Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University. But while those simplifying assumptions might have made it easier to write down a complete equation, they might make it harder to prove that it describes the real universe."-Comment: The bouncing universe is an idea that has been around for awhile. That it gets back to using light (see the bolded section)ties in with the long series of recent submissions on information which refers to the use of light, quoting the OT, in the origin of the universe and Earth. So far it is still singularity and Big Bang.