While plowing through articles that I had stuffed in my Instapaper account I ran across this article from io9 blog: http://io9.com/5694701/does-cosmic-background-radiation-reveal-the-universe-before-the-big-bang.
It’s neat in that Roger Penrose has declared with some authority that the Universe bounces along from big crunch to big bang and that certain features of the cosmic background radiation are hallmarks from a previous incarnation of the universes existence. I’ve always thought that the universe really deserves this sense of endless cycling, a kind of edge-on symmetry.

It’s also quite handy because it dashes the last hidey-hole that “God” could be stuffed into. Without the need of a prime mover pushing the Big Bang out, there is no need for a cosmic father-figure to flick the marble of existence into being. The Big Bang could be “pushed” by the ass end of the previous Big Crunch. It’s delightfully forever and starts people thinking about the metaverse. A concept of a metaverse could be just the thing to give some place for Everett’s solution to stretch it’s legs, as well as the whole possible symmetry of black holes and white holes to play around in. Popular physics despises the concept of a metaverse because we can’t go there and we cant experiment with it. But we could think about it.