why was the 'repeating Universe' theory discarded?

Question

I like that one better than any others I've read about.... it just makes sense to me..... I really don't like the one that has the Universe expanding to death.... too unlike the natural laws we know.....who came up with the repeating theory, anyways?... thanks!!!

Answer 1

I am assuming that by "repeating universe" you are actually referring to the "eternal return" or "eternal recurrence". It was discarded as it relies too much on chance for one and for a million other reasons, here are but a few.

for "repeating universe" it would require a "big crunch" where the universe gets too massive and then shrinks in on itself causing another singularity (thus the birth of universe n+1). This has been studied at length by astrophysicists and mathematicians and it has been almost universally accepted that in the big crunch model the universe would have collapsed in on itself a long time before now. These theories call for a particular velocity of expansion of the universe for it to crunch back, our universe appears to be expanding just faster than that, at C, which is the exact number that fits the eternal expansion theorem.

Finally the "natural laws that we know" are not common on all scales. They do not hold true on the microscopic and they dont hold true on the macroscopic. It is easy to get misled by the physics that we experience here on earth but remember that these laws are a product of us existing on a ball of a specific weight and EVERYTHING around us has come to be in that frame. We do sometimes see things that sit outside this, ie looking at sub atomic physics. The laws of weak and strong nuclear force are very different from those of electromagnetism and Newtonian physics but they do exist in parallel.

Now finally I would like to add that we dont know that the universe isnt going to crunch back in, our calculations have a max level too and we are often wrong about such things but then you have to look at what would happen in the crunch. For our universe to be renewed as it is it would require the alignment of all particles to be exactly the same but in reverse of the expansion. This clearly is not possible so even if it did occur the chances of a universe forming (yes this is conjecture) exactly as ours is is negligible. In fact the chances of any universe forming that could support life would be negligible.

Its most likely that the universe is an example of a set of objects (much like the sets planets, stars, galaxies, people etc) we really know very little about this (though there is some evidence recently of perhaps another universe but this is shallow at the moment) and the sad truth that we have experienced when exploring our own solar system (let alone the rest of the galaxy or universe) is that most things act in a way very differently than would seem "normal" to us. Its normal to think the crunch model works but who would have thought that the next most likely place for life in our solar system was a warm watery world that orbits an extremely distant gas giant? No one expected that, not until it was right in front of our eyes.

Oh I nearly forgot, we dont know the universe is expanding to death either. There are possible energy inputs and outputs that we dont understand (ask the questions: what is at the other end of a black hole? Could there be the back end of one somewhere in our universe warming it up?) it may be an eternal process in itself, after all billions of years (from our perspective) is almost eternal isnt it?

Answer 2

The Big Bounce?I dun know who made it,maybe Einstein?It doesnt really make sense to ME..I'm going with the big rip after seeing tons of ppl at fast food restaurants...

Answer 3

The universe is a quantum finite entity with a beginning and an end.
It is an incident that happens once and never happens again.

Answer 4

I'll go with the "bungy cord" theory - eventually, everything breaks. Did you see the new info on "black holes"? I've always thought if you turn them around they're white. RScott

Answer 5

That theory was discarded because
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense
it made no sense