The Big Bounce
Terms aren't concrete reflections of reality, but rather constructs shaped by the "game" we play in scientific discourse. Our terms—"dark energy," "Big Bang," "crumpled aether"—are part of a specific linguistic framework that allows scientists to discuss phenomena that are, frankly, still poorly understood. The Hubble tension, for example, could be seen not just as a problem of measurement, but as a reflection of the limits of our current scientific language. You have to ask yourself, are we trapped by the words we use?
The Big Bounce isn’t just a cyclical return to expansion after a universe-wide contraction—it’s a challenge to the idea that the universe ever began in a singular moment, like the Big Bang. Think about the universe more like a lung, continuously expanding and contracting, each cycle giving birth to new structures while folding old ones deeper into the cosmic fabric. We often talk about the universe as smooth, but quantum theories like Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) tell us that space-time has a limit to how much it can be compressed. It’s here, at the Planck scale, where space-time resists collapsing into a singularity and instead bounces back into expansion. This isn’t just a smooth return either—the universe crumples, leaving behind the relics of past cycles: black holes, dark matter structures, and anomalies in the cosmic microwave background.
This idea doesn’t stop at theoretical abstraction. Research suggests that dark matter and dark energy play key roles in how the universe cycles between contraction and expansion. In a Big Crunch, dark matter pulls everything inward, but dark energy, with its repulsive force, might dominate during the crunch, preventing total collapse and instead causing the universe to "bounce" back. It’s a tug-of-war on the largest scale, and quantum effects resist the collapse at the critical point, ensuring the universe rebounds rather than crumpling into a singular point. This interaction between dark matter and dark energy, particularly during the bounce, offers a tantalizing possibility that the universe’s rhythm—its very breath—could be eternal, cycling forever through bounces, each one leaving a cosmic fingerprint(ICJS)(ar5iv).
Wittgenstein, with his later work in Philosophical Investigations, would have been all over the fact that language shapes how we think about science. We don’t just use words to describe the world; we use them to construct it, to box in concepts that are far too fluid for the neat terms we assign them. So, yeah, we can say "dark energy" like it’s a static, well-understood thing, but are we really sure we know what we’re talking about? In our world, meaning is use, and the way physicists talk about dark energy might just be the latest move in the "language game" of cosmology.
Now, when we throw in the Big Bounce, the language game gets even weirder. Let’s not kid ourselves—terms like dark energy and dark matter are placeholders, names we give to forces we can’t fully understand; probably way more complex and intertwined with things we haven’t even begun to conceptualize yet. We’ve only just got around to asking if space-time is crumpled, and light-speed is maybe not the universal speed limit we’ve all agreed it is.
We build our philosophical and scientific towers out of words, then get mad when they crumble because the reality we’re trying to capture refuses to sit still. The way we talk about dark energy and the universe expanding is full of assumptions—and not just scientific ones, but linguistic ones. It’s no wonder we get stuck in traps of thinking when we’re dealing with terms that have evolved from flawed or incomplete understanding. Language isn’t static, and neither is the universe.
Here’s where humility comes into play. We can’t help but laugh at ourselves a little when we realize how tentative all our models are. The more we dig into the Big Bounce, the more we realize how much of what we "know" is based on metaphor, on the limits of the words we use. Like Wittgenstein said, if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand him—not because of the words, but because his world is so fundamentally different. The universe is the lion here. We’re just trying to string together what little we know in language that doesn’t quite stretch far enough to hold it all.
So no, we’re not picking fights with the dark energy nerds, just poking at the boxes they (and we) have built. Its like playing a long language game, one where the rules keep changing, and where it’s not just about what we say but how we say it. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll have to relearn the language of the universe with every bounce?
In this context my, crumpled aether theory fits beautifully. If space-time is inherently "crumpled" by the forces of previous expansions and contractions, then light-speed and cosmic expansion rates are also variable. We observe a smoothness, but that’s only because we’re seeing the universe at its largest scale—at smaller, quantum levels, space-time is a tangled mess, folded and twisted by cycles of expansion and contraction. The loop quantum gravity approach supports this: space-time can only crumple so far before it resists, and when it does, it’s like stretching a rubber band to its limit. The bounce back is explosive, releasing the energy that fuels the next cycle of the universe’s expansion(ar5iv)(ar5iv).
This cyclical model also helps explain some of the Hubble tension we see today—discrepancies in the measured expansion rates of the universe. If space-time is crumpled, light moving through different regions would behave unpredictably, distorting how we measure distances. This suggests that the so-called "constant" speed of light may not be so constant after all. It behaves like a threshold, where from our limited viewpoint, differences become undetectable, and we assume light travels uniformly. But on the quantum scale, these variations likely contribute to the cosmic inconsistencies we’ve been wrestling with for years(ar5iv).
The Big Bounce isn’t just a neat theory for cyclical universes—it’s a way of understanding the universe as a living, breathing entity. Each bounce is a pulse of creation, a reminder that what we observe is just one part of a greater cosmic rhythm. Black holes, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background—all of these are remnants of past cycles, imprints of previous bounces, and clues to the universe’s deeper, more intricate structure. When you view it through the lens of crumpled aether, each cycle layers more complexity onto the last, forming the universe we see today. It’s not just a bounce—it’s a cosmic memory being etched deeper into the fabric of space-time with each cycle.
