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WORLD  Big Bangs Spark Row FROM NATURE.COM  SCIENCE, Apr 30 (VNN) — Cosmologists claim Universe has been forming and reforming for eternity. The Universe was not born in one Big Bang, it has been going through cycles of creation and annihilation for eternity, according to a controversial new mathematical model1. It's a compelling claim. The new cyclic model removes a major stumbling block common to existing theories of the Universe - namely, that physics can't explain what came before the Big Bang. Because the model relies on new mathematics, it is having some teething problems, admit its proposers. Indeed, most cosmologists are treating the hypothesis with interested scepticism. Some are vociferously critical. Criticism is to be expected, concedes Neil Turok of Cambridge University, UK, who developed the cyclic model with cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University in New Jersey. "We're taking on some very fundamental issues here," says Turok. Strings attached Steinhardt and Turok draw on the emerging science of string theory. This mathematical idea uses up to ten dimensions - instead of the usual four - to explain the weird behaviour of tiny things in physics called fundamental particles. When applied to big things like cosmology, string theory invokes weird mathematical entities called membranes - branes for short. In the cyclic model there are two branes at any one time, one containing our Universe, the other a parallel Universe that is the mirror image of our own. The researchers suggest that these branes regularly collide, as they did 15 billion years ago, resulting in the massive release of energy previously ascribed to the Big Bang. And just like the Big Bang, "this collision made all the radiation and matter that fills the Universe," says Turok. Full article Contact VNN about this story  Send this story to a friend
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