the expansion may reverse itself and go into con-traction, culminating in the so-called 'big crunch'. Some big crunchmodels have the universe then bouncing back into expansion, andso on indefinitely with, say, a 20-billion-year cycle time. Thestandard model of our universe says that time itself began in the bigbang, along with space, some 13 billion years ago. The serial bigcrunch model would amend that statement: our time and space didindeed begin in our big bang, but this was just the latest in a longseries of big bangs, each one initiated by the big crunch thatterminated the previous universe in the series.

The God Delusion On page 146 Monday, November 5, 2012 @ 1:54pm