image:kurtxio
I was contacted recently by Peter Lynds, the young physics iconoclast who turned some heads back in 2003 with a paper purporting correctly to resolve Zeno's paradox by defining time as having no quantized base unit, even in principle. (Full disclosure: Lynds also turned heads by being a mysterious figure without a University affiliation or degree.) That paper appeared in Foundation of Physics Letters, igniting a firestorm of internet debate over whether this was young Einstein at work, dormroom speculation being treated like formalized science, a hoax, or something different from all of these.
None of that interests me, but Lynds' new subject--the Big Crunch--does. His thoughts on How the World Ends also dovetail nicely with several topics already discussed on this site, to wit: the problem with singularities, the origin, and definition, of time's arrow; the question of whether an infinite cosmological past is properly conceivable; even the question of whether the SCM is hamstrung by linear-time expectations arising from western religious perspectives.
Hamlet believed he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. In a nutshell, then, Lynds' theory of space posits a finite universe with neither beginning nor end; one that disallows singularities; disallows time travel; requires a low entropy past; and avoids the paradoxes associated with either a finite or an infinite causal chain.
The notion here, if I understand it correctly, is that the inviolability of the second law of thermodynamics stops the universe from being bounded by singularities, including those that would otherwise form at the Bang and the Crunch. One might say instead that the universe has "end zones‚" but not "end-points" (Anthony, chime in here if you're having any more luck coming up with new cosmology terms. By the way, I rather like "hot pocket"). That is, it has regions where what we think of as the Beginning and the End are approached, but within those regions the status of "future" and "past" flips. This is a neat way of avoiding singularities almost by fiat.
To say it another way: on the assumption that we are living in a spacetime with a positive constant curvature (we should note that the best data do not now support this), as the Crunching Universe approaches its singularity the thermodynamic arrow will be forced into an inverted position by the exigencies of spacetime collapse. Entropy becomes disentropy if you continue to go that way, with hot flowing always into hotter; if the thermodynamic arrow defines forward motion in time, however, we are now, de facto, moving the other direction. Thus the Crunch is a Bang looked at backwards, so to speak. Lynds calls this a model for a "cyclic universe," but at first glance the overall picture looks more like Block Time: a spacetime expansion regarding itself in a mirror.
Peter, is this something like the flavor of your argument?
image:pshan