“People love cyclic and regenerating universes. They appeal to our sense of narrative, which might be a reason to be wary of these hypotheses.”
PBS Space Time · Ideas & Essays · August 2026
O'Dowd had just run through the alternatives to a singularity at the start of time: cosmic inflation, the Big Bounce, colliding branes in the Steinhardt-Turok model, Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, Smolin's universes born inside black holes. Having laid out how satisfying the cyclic options are, he turns that satisfaction into a reason for suspicion.
Transcript
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…could initiate a new Big Bang given infinite time. Or the same amount of time could lead to all particles randomly converging back to the same spot. Or maybe black holes birth new universes as in Lee Smallins' fecund universe hypothesis. There's a poetry to that last one. The geodesics approaching the black hole singularity become the geodesics emerging from the new Big Bang singularity. People love cyclic and regenerating universes. They appeal to our sense of narrative, which might be a reason to be wary of these hypotheses. Now, they also appeal to our intuition for causality.
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Things happen because prior events cause them. Many of our ideas just push back the uncomfortable something from nothing moments. Physicists have a thing or two to say about that, from quantum fluctuations from nothing to Stephen Hawking's timeless interpretation of internal inflation that draws on…