Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over:
"Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns."
"Each of the early Stoics taught that the universe, after certain definite periods of time (whose duration is never specified), dissolves into fire and so 'purifies' itself ... We can see how this process would have been outlined by Zeno: the universe originally generated from creative fire (pyr technikon); after a period of time it resolved itself once again into pure fire, whence another universe was in turn generated from the pure creative fire. The cosmic process is therefore an infinite series of finite phases of alternate diakosmesis and ekpyrosis."
/misc | Nov 30, 2010