Expert: Ed - 4/1/2006

Question
Hello, thank you for the answer. I'm not sure if that is the theory, but what I have in mind was proposed at the beginning of the 20th century (after the revelations of Hubble about the expansion had been revealed), stating that there's a little "offset" in the velocity directions of the material objects, so that if you try to go back in time, instead of all winding up in the same place, they will "fly past one another", thus avoiding the singularity.



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Followup To
Question -
Who proposed an alternative to the big bang/ implosion, suggesting that the matter instead of colliding could fly past one another and thus the expansion/collapse would turn into a pendulum-like motion?
Answer -
Michael,
Ask me this again please, if I am misunderstanding you question.

Are you asking if the universe could expand, then contract, than expand again, repeating this cycle forever?  This is called the oscillating universe theory, or the oscillatory universe theory.  It was proposed by Richard Tolman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tolman

Keep Looking Up!
--Ed

Answer
Michael,

Well, one thought that occurs to me is that you need to bear in mind that Space itself is expanding, all around and between all the objects in the universe. Therefore, if you could somehow trace the vector of a given object back in time, in an attempt to trace it back to the original singularity at the Big Bang, your results would almost certainly be wrong, because there would be no way to accurately estimate exactly how much physically intervening space had locally sprung into existence in the last 13 and a half billion years, since the origin of the universe. The result of trying to calculate all the vectors, if you could possibly perform such complex calculations, would be much as you describe, with various objects appearing to "fly past each other" at the beginning of the universe, rather than meeting in one point at the primordial singularity.

Here is a really cool article from a couple of years ago, talking about the process that I'm referring to:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040524.html

I hope this answers your question better than my first effort. Also, do you know about Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial? People love it. Check it out here:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

If you're really getting into cosmology, and you want to be VERY hardcore, I would encourage you to try to follow some of the abstracts posted on this websoite, and its links. It's absolutely cutting edge research, as presented to the astronomers and physicists at MIT, Harvard, and Tufts universities. Be warned, it is very difficult, so don't expect to understand very much. But if you're really interested... it's up to you!
http://www-ctp.mit.edu/cosmo.html

I hope this is more helpful. Keep Looking Up!
--Ed