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Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe
KentuckyFC writes In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the U.S., Einstein penned a little known paper that attempted to show how his theory of general relativity could account for some of the latest scientific evidence. In particular, Einstein had met Edwin Hubble during his trip and so was aware of the latter's data indicating that the universe must be expanding. The resulting model is of a universe that expands and then contracts with a singularity at each end. In other words, Einstein was studying a universe that starts with a big bang and ends in a big crunch. What's extraordinary about the paper is that Einstein misspells Hubble's name throughout and makes a number of numerical errors in his calculations. That's probably because he wrote the paper in only 4 days, say the historians who have translated it into English for the time. This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.
He spelled Hubble as "Hubbel", german way. Hubbel is also a german word meaning "bump".
The Hindu's have some mindbogglingly long number they came up with like 12000 years ago that's supposed to be how long the Universe spends between Big Bangs, before it's reborn. As in the Hindu religion there is no death, no end of the world, everything cycles on, in a perpetual reincarnation way. I think it's one of the biggest numbers that humans ever came up with, bigger than Aristotle's cattle problem, but not sure. I'm too lazy to research it and look up references and substantiate claims for it right now, but there you have it, a fleeting idea.