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.
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.
The James Webb telescope is already pulling in a lot of data that is contrary to the BBT. A lot of science is 1 part logic, 2 parts personal religion though, so it will be a while before it’s abandoned for the next big thing.
From what I’ve been reading, it’s not contrary to the theory, it just seems to be pushing back the overall age of universe. And I’ve already seen two theories emerge from the new data – one that shows how our estimates of the age of galaxies based on the speed of light may be underestimated, and the second with math that actually corrects some of the other issues scientists have had. Curiously both of these new models push the universe to being almost twice as old, at around 22 billion years instead of 13.
So yeah, the universe may be older than anticipated, but I certainly haven’t seen anything that outright contradicts the big bang theory.
Dr. Becky on Youtube went over the paper suggesting an older universe. Both her explanation of what the issue is and her thoughts are interesting. This is exactly the purpose of the JWST and it's great we're getting more data to analyze and debate over.
As for the Big Bang itself, there is no conflict with there being something before the Big Bang, we just can't see past that event because of its very nature with the tools we have thus far, even the JWST. My own non-science theory is that our universe and the BB itself was sparked by some interaction beyond our universe, two or more "things" interacting and causing what we see now.
I feel that it is important for science communicators to acknowledge that the “22 billion years” is just an idea being thrown around, not an established scientific fact overturning all our previous 13.8GY calculations. It’s based on images from JWST that are slightly “redder” than we expected, but they are so dim we don’t even have a full spectrum for them yet. It would be pretty hard to reconcile 22GY with the Lambda-CDM model which does use very precise measurements and calculations on the Cosmic Microwave Background. It would be a big deal if all those calculations turned out to be off all by the same amount. There are alternative (equally-speculative) ideas being floated to explain the red images, such as “dark matter stars”.
I fear that when gnostics see headlines like that, all they see is confirmation of their belief that scientists don’t know what they are talking about. “Last year they told us universe was 13 billion years old, now they tell us it’s 22! If the number can change so wildly, there is no reason for us to think that the current number is accurate either, so we can safely ignore it.” Or: “Twenty years ago they told us we are entering an ice age, now they tell us we are getting global warming. They can’t get their story straight, for all we know next year they will start talking about “global freezing”, so we can safely ignore all their warnings.”
Now, science is a process of incremental improvement, where an idea can be overturned if proven to be wrong. There is always an ongoing search to find alternative better explanations - this is good! But these popular science headlines too easily sensationalize these fringe efforts and make it sound as if they have already overtaken the mainstream. And the constant deluge of such headlines has made a large segment of the population turn away from science entirely, potentially causing harm to us all. IMO in reality there hasn’t actually been a big paradigm shift since the 1920s. It’s important to communicate that!
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.
Add comment