Multiple BigBangs

Dr. Sten Odenwald
If the universe oscillates, will we [live] on and on for eternity?
The further development of the 'Oscillatory Big Bang' model in the 1930's demonstrated that such universes are unlikely to have infinite numbers of cycles unless the singularity state that is reached after each recollapse is able to completely re-set the physical parameters of the universe, in particular the accumulated entropy. This was shown by physicist Richard Tolman. If this can happen, the result would as easily include the cessation of all oscillations.

Because stars are presumably produced during each cycle, they convert some of the mass of the universe into radiation via fusion. This, along with other physical processes, invariably causes the total entropy of a universe to increase, as measured by the number of photons per quark that the universe contains. With each subsequent cycle, more radiation is invariably added to the previous quantity carried over from the previous cycle. The dynamical consequence is that the universe expands to a slightly greater maximum size after every cycle. Some envision that the first few cycles barely got the universe to last longer than a billion billion billionth of a second. But in subsequent cycles the lifetime of the cycle increased until now it is at least 15 billion years or more. In future cycles, this time scale will increase without limit until in the 'last' cycle, the universe will reach almost infinite size.
Now, the problem with this is that there is no known process by which the 'entropy' per cycle isn't changed by the tremendously dissipative processes occurring near the Big Bang itself. There is no plausible mechanism whereby the universe can 'remember' anything from a past cycle. This being the case, you are just as justified in believing that the oscillatory universe theory is now a defunct one!

At the instant of the Big Bang, the universe was infinitely dense and unimaginably hot. Cosmologists believe that all forms of matter and energy, as well as space and time itself, were formed at this instant. Since "before" is a temporal concept, one cannot ask what came before the Big Bang and therefore "caused" it, at least not within the context of any known physics. (At least one cosmological theory, however, predicts that our universe's Big Bang is part of a chain reaction in which the demise of one universe spawns the birth of many, parallel, universes. According to this scenario, our universe may simply be part of a huge, infinitely growing fractal.)

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Backgound: Nebula M1-67 around star WR 224