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Big Bang or Cosmic Crunch?

Posted by timothy on from the with-nougat-caramel-and-turkish-delight dept.

BrianGa writes: "Yahoo news is reporting on Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt suggesting that the universe never began and will never end, driven forever to expand in a series of monster explosions and contract every eon or so in a cosmic crunch. This is directly contradictory to the big-bang theory. The model of the universe envisioned by Steinhardt sees the big bang as merely a turning point on an infinite road."

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  1. The Ekpyrotic Theory... by cybrpnk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's a lot of theories about alternatives to the big bang besides the one mentioned in the Yahoo article. The main one that is getting a lot of interest in scientific circles isn't this new one in the Yahoo article. Instead, it's the so called Ekpyrotic theory, with the name coming for the Greek word for fire. It is so intresting because it brings together two disparate areas of physics: inflation and M branes. Inflation is a weird concept that says the universe expanded from the diameter or an atom to the size of a grapefruit almost instantly - required to explain the way galaxies are clumped and clustered in the sky we see today and first postulated by a guy named Alan Guth. M branes are an offshoot of string theory postulated by Ed Whitten. There's tons of stuff on these topics on the web; all of it is facinating, enter any of these terms in a search engine and keep reading. Next stop, Google...