The Possibility of Experimental Results for a Cyclic Universe?

I am not particularly enamoured with the idea of a cyclic universe as a hypothesis, however, if the data comes back and shows it as such, well, then I may have to change my mind.  Or as Carl Sagan said:

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

• Keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987)

Anyway, I was a bit surprised at this finding.  (If you want the whole paper, here it is in PDF format.)  Basically the idea is that the universe has a cyclic nature, and that our Big bang was just one of many throughout cosmological time.  And we may be able to detect the echoes of any black holes that were in the previous universe in this universe.  If the universe is indeed cyclical, then the question of what happened before the big bang (t=0) would actually have an answer as opposed to being nonsensical.  Although, I suppose this may shut out another gap for even a deistic god figure.  Of course, I'm sure some theitard will get their panties in a bunch about this as well.  You know how reality tends to always disagree with their primitive iron age fables...

Persistence of black holes through a cosmological bounce

B. J. Carr, A.A. Coley

(Submitted on 19 Apr 2011)

We discuss whether black holes could persist in a universe which recollapses and then bounces into a new expansion phase. Whether the bounce is of classical or quantum gravitational origin, such cosmological models are of great current interest. In particular, we investigate the mass range in which black holes might survive a bounce and ways of differentiating observationally between black holes formed just after and just before the last bounce. We also discuss the consequences of the universe going through a sequence of dimensional changes as it passes through a bounce.

Comments:	8 pages, 1 figure
Subjects:	Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
Cite as:	arXiv:1104.3796v1 [astro-ph.CO]

Submission history

From: Alan Coley [view email]
[v1] Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:34:12 GMT (29kb,D)