The Oscillating Universe

An alternative theory to inflation

It was the hottest time of day when the shark washed up on the crowded beach. Directly overhead was the blistering yellow face of the sun, its gleaming rays falling into the pits of footprints in the sand or into plastic buckets painted with sunscreen and melted ice cream. I caught glimpses of the shark — the white clay color of his belly, slackened jaws and then flashes of blood and teeth — during brief openings in the pillars of people gathering ‘round. He must have only been recently killed because he was perfectly preserved and still bearing that signature of life, still appearing as if he might move his eyes at any moment to look out at the busy Florida shore. But instead his eyes remained fixed on me. Or so I felt. A sundry melted grey watching me even as I kneeled beneath the broad brim of a far away umbrella.

I am separated by that shark now in many ways. His body is in another state, buried or decomposed or consumed by other wildlife. There is the natural separation that occurs across species where he cannot understand my fears and desires just as I will never understand his. And now, since this is a memory from years ago, we are separated by time. The event and everything within it still exists but is no longer accessible to me because it exists in the past. Relativity shows us that, similarly, the events of our future already exist but are inaccessible because we are bound by the arrow of time. Just as we think of ourselves as being separated by distances and points within space, we must think of time the same way. The past and the future are nothing but points in the landscape of the fourth dimension, the woven fabric of spacetime.

When we think of the multiverse and why we may not be able to travel to other worlds, we often consider that the distances are too great. We will need superluminal spacecraft to find the next world in the quilted multiverse or the next bubble of the inflationary multiverse. Even if other dimensions are just centimeters away, we are bound to our own branes and must find a way to communicate across those small but challenging distances. With the cyclical model of the multiverse, researchers wanted to find an alternative to our assumptions. We must consider time, not just distance.

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