In Paul Steinhardt’s corners of the cosmology world, to say that history repeats itself would be a laughable understatement. That’s because according to him and a handful of peers, the universe’s form might be hurtling into a new cycle every trillion years or so.
“One hundred million years sounds like a long time, but cosmically it's like tomorrow,” Steinhardt says.
The professor of physics and director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science co-authored a paper on this topic, A Cyclic Model of the Universe, with Neil Turok. The cyclic model of the universe he helped pioneer is just that: a theory that the universe forms itself again and again in cycles.
Proponents of this model are asking us to rethink the Big Bang and the rapid inflation of the universe. They contend that doing so could fill in some of the biggest gaps in our common understanding of the way space and time work.
