Eternal Return - Modern Cosmology

Modern Cosmology

The oscillating universe theory - that the universe will end in a collapse or 'big crunch' followed by another big bang, and so on - dates from 1930. Cosmologists such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Max Tegmark suggests that if space is sufficiently large and uniform, or infinite as some theories suggest, then identical instances of the history of Earth's entire Hubble volume occur every so often, simply by chance. Tegmark calculates that our nearest so-called doppelgänger, is 1010115 meters away from us (a double exponential function larger than a googolplex). In principle, it would be impossible to scientifically verify an identical Hubble volume. However, it does follow as a fairly straightforward consequence from otherwise unrelated scientific observations and theories. Tegmark suggests that statistical analyses exploiting the anthropic principle provide an opportunity to test multiverse theories in some cases. Generally, science would consider a multiverse theory that posits neither a common point of causation, nor the possibility of interaction between universes, to be an ideal speculation. However, it is a fundamental assumption of cosmology that the universe continues to exist beyond the scope of the observable universe, and that the distribution of matter is everywhere the same at such a large scale (see cosmological principle).

Modern cosmological proposals have also been made by Peter Lynds, who suggested a model of eternal recurrence in a 2006 paper, and by James Quirk, who approached the question through a hypothesis based on the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics.