Is the Universe Undergoing an Infinite Series of Expansions and Contractions?

[ranyart]

Here is a new paper by Niel Turok and Paul J Steinhardt.

http://uk.arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0403/0403020.pdf

The initial reading makes one ask a simple question, if I was to be at a far away location, say at the QSO of farthest detected Galaxy, and I looked back to the location of Milkyway, would I detect a Positive Vacuum Energy a hundred orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum energy needed to drive inflation?

Or would the fact I am looking at the Milkyway from across the Universe yeild different positive vacuum energy signature's.

I guess a simpler question is this, are local positive vacuum energies present in Local Space, or are they at far away locations?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

The cyclic universe is a cosmological model of the universe in which the universe undergoes an infinite series of expansions and contractions. The model is a hypothetical solution to the dark energy problem in cosmology. The cyclic model posits that the universe expands from an initial state of infinite density, analogous to the singularity of the Big Bang, into a vast space filled with a nearly-constant-density fluid of matter, analogous to the present-day universe, and then contracts again to a state of infinite density. The model is motivated by an analogy to the QCD phase transition, through the observation of dark energy being constant in time. The model is an example of a theory of everything.

The cyclic model was proposed by the physicist Paul Steinhardt and the cosmologist Neil Turok in 1999. They presented three possible motivations for the model: the "phantom energy problem", the flatness problem, and the horizon problem.