> The CMB argument around the big bang is misunderstanding what is being witnessed. It's not the start of the universe that it's revealing information about, bu

> The CMB argument around the big bang is misunderstanding what is being witnessed. It's not the start of the universe that it's revealing information about, but rather a perpetual cycle. The universe regurgitates, it does not begin or end. The idea of a cyclical universe has been around for decades (I recall seeing a diagram about it as a child 20 years ago), there isn't a mis-understanding of what the CMB reveals. It gives evidence about the creation of our _own_ observable universe, and the state of matter moments after the creation event of _our_ universe referred to as the big bang. Ideas regarding our observable universe residing in higher dimensional spaces have been around for several decades under the name Brane Cosmology. In fact this interpretation of the CMB has been studied for evidence of a "mother" or pre-universe state [0]. After an initial round of statistically modelling and excitement, it was found with the current abilities of the WMAP satelitte that no evidence of a such a pre-universe was detectable [1] My confusion in your position is that these models are absolutely not in contradiction of the big bang model, which explains _our_ universe (saying nothing of multiverses). There can be a lot of misunderstanding in the general public regarding science and pop science and words that have specific meaning (universe, multiverse) can be used incorrectly. It's not fair to direct mis-appropriating terms against the scientific theories themselves. > Compression, release, distribution, re-compression. This isn't true for our current universe at least, we are in a run away state of expansion, there will be no re-compression. > That process is going to upset a lot of people that have bet their entire professional lives on it. This is a gross exaggeration. Every cosmologist I've known is desperately searching for something different, unintuitive, completely unexpected and exciting. It's fun! [0] http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1011/1011.3706.pdf http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1011/1011.3706.pdf [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656 http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656