The Ultimate Recycling Project: A Boost for the Hindu Myths of Cosmology?

The idea that the universe is eternally recycling itself over vast eons of time is an intuition about our cosmos that Hindus have long held, and at least some contemporary cosmologists may be arriving at a similar belief.

This from New Scientist this week:

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. “I was taken aback,” he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang “singularity”, the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening?

Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe – something even Einstein’s general theory of relativity fails to do.

Read the full article here.

After reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Shiva”:

There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky, She killed the pigeons of peace and security, She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men, She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty. She loads the arts with nonsense, she is very cunning Science with dreams and the state with powers to catch them at last. Nothing will escape her at last, flying nor running. This is the hawk that picks out the star’s eyes. This is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan; The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things. Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, Empty darkness under the death-tent wings. She will build a nest of the swan’s bones and hatch a new brood, Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.