Personally, I prefer this theory...

[pbmus]

Link to tweet

[mr_lebowski]

1. I've always thought there's no way the universe ever 'was not' and then it 'was'

I don't think time as we understand it entirely 'applies'.

The universe has always been and will always be. It might go through cycles of expanding and then contracting, however.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. According to My Son The Astronomer,

the Universe will keep on expending pretty much forever. There simply isn't enough matter/gravity/whatever to stop the expansion. After trillions of years the heat death of the Universe will happen, when everything is dead and burned out.

After reading that article, I don't feel as if the physicists have a convincing case. I will have to run this by MSTA.

Added on edit: I do believe that for a very long time it was thought that the Universe could be cyclical, but as I understand it, and as we got better at measuring things, that idea simply does not hold up.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

6. That's the common hypothesis.

I watched a program by Sean Carroll from Caltech, and he described some hypothetical mechanism for that high-entropic universe to then "lay an egg" for another low-entropy one. Lol! I don't even recall the reasoning now, but that was the analogy that he used.

[cstanleytech]

10. That assumes space is infinite though.

Since we know gravity does curve space so its possible that given enough time it will eventually cause most of the matter to eventually come back to gather and then rebound outward again and form a new cosmos and rinse and repeat.

[hedda_foil]

3. I've thought of it this way since I was about ten.

On the other hand, the idea of multiple universes cycling through some form of black holes has always appealed as well.

[cstanleytech]

11. Well the blackholes are part of it as they are what causes the eventually curving that will lead to

the next bounce.

[KPN]

4. Makes way more sense to this pea brained mortal.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Nothing new about this at all-- Einstein talked about a cyclic universe and ancent Hindus...

had cycles of around 6 billion years. Fact is, it's much easier to think in cycles than to try to imagine what it was like before there was anything.

Now, when did the cycles start? And what started them?

[cstanleytech]

12. But that is just it there was never no nothing. If there was then we would not exist so there had to

be something and a bouncing universe that expands, curves and then rebounds makes sense.

[TreasonousBastard]

14. Of course it does. But, have you ever tried to imagine what nothing is? We're here, but what if...

all this never existed? The mind insists something has to exist. Even nothing may actually be something.

Even the thought of an eternally bouncing universe, or multiple universes that bounce back and forth breaks down when you ask "How did it start?"

Just asking "What is eternity anyway?" causes problems.

[Glamrock]

7. The universe was created by a black hole pushing matter from another.

Period. And you know my opinion has more basis than any physics professor. I'm a talking head on fox news after all....

[mn9driver]

8. Everything that we can calculate goes back to the moment of the Big Bang.

And as far as I know, that’s as far as we can go. The moment before that is a complete mystery and unless we come up with some new information, that’s the wall we cannot pierce.

Every idea about “before” has no actual basis. No evidence of any kind. Scientifically, “before” doesn’t exist. Weird.

[stopdiggin]

9. that's what my brainy friends tell me

And I don't argue with them because ...
Well, basically because I can't ...
Have no real reason to ...

And would only reveal myself to be far stupider than any of us would like to pretend.
----- ------

[unblock]

13. Right. If all the energy of the universe was in a single point, there's no evidence to tell us

what came before. There's no trace to tell us even what the laws of physics were prior to that point. We're free to speculate, but that's beyond the realm of science. Indeed, as far as science is concerned, time itself came into being at the moment of the Big Bang.

It's not that there was nothing before the Big Bang, it's that there was no "before" the Big Bang.

[hunter]

15. In my favorite model of the universe everything looks pretty much the same...

... wherever or whenever you go.

Wherever and whenever are the same thing in my model. We're all just patterns in the light. No matter where you go there you are.

If you go 20 billion years in any direction (including time), this universe looks the same. By our current perception it would still look like there was some "beginning," a big bang maybe. But that beginning may be an illusion.

Other models are much smaller, starting hot and ending cold. Or they are cyclic.

Alas "faster than light" travel and time travel are impossible in this universe, and more to the point, this universe doesn't care what humans think. The universe will go on doing its own thing with or without us.

Most of us have gotten past the idea that the earth is the center of the universe and that everything up in the sky revolves around us, but very few of us are willing to accept we are not the center of time. Without a "now" to grasp onto, what is the meaning of our lives?

When earth was the center of creation and the universe was very small, with some god watching it all spinning around like a proud clock maker, it was much easier to feel like we were important. After all, we humans were created in god's image. It says so in a book.

It's much more difficult to establish our own meanings in a universe that's very large, extending beyond the 13.8 billion years we can observe.

How small are we? Here's some galaxies:



Not stars, galaxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Observatories_Origins_Deep_Survey

[Warpy]

16. I've always found the bang and crunch model more elegant

it's just hard to visualize because it isn't expanding into anything, space and time are artifacts of the universe and don't exist outside it. In addition, given the directional bias of time, we could be minutes away from the big crunch but unable to see everything coming together in one blazing point because we can't see the future.

Or maybe it's just 42.

[NNadir]

17. The real problem with these "theories" is that they are not subject to proof or disproof.

Irrespective of the elegance of any calculations to suggest them, they still border, at least, on the edge of religion.

This is why they fit easily into twitter.

[CloudWatcher]

18. A little off-topic

But I have to chime in and recommend Asimov's "The Last Question" to anyone pondering the eventual fate of the universe. There are (at least) a couple readings of it on youtube.

[CatLady78]

19. Interesting.nt