Question: Do you think the Big Bang theory is true or do you believe in something else?

Benjamin Bose answered on 14 Mar 2016:

I personally don’t like your standard Big Bang theory because it involves a beginning of infinite density and a beginning of time. But I am very attracted to cyclic models which involve cycles of expansion and contraction – whenever I look at nature I see symmetries and cycles so it would be nice if the universe was like this too (after all the universe IS nature!). Well, to be more specific, was like this in time – with respect to space the universe has a lot of symmetry (it’s very almost the same in every direction you look). So I’d like time to have more obvious symmetry, but I think we just don’t understand time.

There have been many attempts at cyclic universe models but they all have their problems unfortunately. The best model we have is the standard Big Bang one with inflation. This model still doesn’t say anything about what actually was happening very very very early on, an instant before time 0 which is good… mystery is always good – otherwise we’d have nothing to do or wonder about 🙂