Recent content by mykamakiri

In an article called "From big bang to big bounce" published in New Scientist in 2008, author Anil Ananthaswamy outlines two different theories that lead to our universe being cyclic. 1: "Cosmologists are still very much in the dark about dark energy. Some theoretical models speculate that the...

This is really terrific. Another idea I came across in reading about cyclic models (the one suggested by Steinhardt and Turok, if memory serves) is that dark energy is going to decay and become attractive rather than repulsive, which would lead to a contracting phase. By your standards, is this...

Forgive me for confusing bounce and cyclic cosmologies - my bad! With that out of the way: if you grant that the big bounce model is correct, what could hypothetically have caused the contraction of the universe preceding ours?

We know that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In big bounce (or oscillatory) models of the universe, why does the expansion of the universe end? And what drives the following, contracting phase? Is it possible that dark energy could inverse its action at some point in the...