Are we all just part of an endless cosmic cycle

• Science’s best guess at how the universe came into being includes the Big Bang followed by a moment of rapid inflationary expansion.

• However, this theory left a few mysteries and quirks in its wake, including the existence of dark matter and conundrums like “the flatness problem.”

• A fringe theory known as non-singular matter bouncing cosmology claims to answer these issues by suggesting that the universe “bounces” between a hot big bang era and the kind of universe we see today.

Answering the question of how everything began was always going to be a difficult one, but humans have made incredible progress—especially considering that, in the cosmological blink of an eye, we’ve gone from writing on cave walls to carrying handheld computers around in our pockets.

Although an intriguing idea, the Big Bang + Inflation model of the universe is still the modern cave man’s best bet at understanding what shaped our universe. But the researchers say it should be possible to figure out if this non-singular matter bouncing cosmology holds any merit as “enhanced curvature perturbations, collapsing to primordial black holes, can induce as well a stochastic gravitational-wave background.”