There was no bang in the Big Bang.

At least that’s what Paul Frampton says. The physicist has created a buzz all around the world as his hypothesis has grown from a private discussion to a hot topic on Wikipedia. Frampton has ironed out the inconsistencies in the Big Bang theory by refuting it altogether.

Here’s what we know about the Big Bang. It was kind of like a giant game of Concentration, where lots of unrelated, nonsensical puzzle pieces came together at precisely the same time and perfect orientation, 13.7 billion years ago, to create a universe. This “anthropic principle”—the theory that a lot of parameters had to fit tightly together so that our present universe could exist—leads to a swarm of philosophical and religious issues, and frankly, Frampton and many of his contemporaries regard it as somewhat implausible.

So everyone knows the beginning, but few know that the Big Bang theory can envision an even more explosive ending. The second law of thermodynamics—which states that the entropy, or disorder, of the universe is always increasing—means that the universe is constantly inconstant. It’s always expanding, faster and faster, to the point where the universe can come to a “Big Rip,” Frampton says, “a finite time in the future where the universe—space, the solar system, galaxies, atoms, even protons and neutrons—tears itself apart into patches, and time ends.”

Many physicists and cosmologists have been avid skeptics of the Big Bang theory since its inception in the 1930s, and in the 1950s they furnished its title, which they meant to be derogatory. While various alternate theories have been proposed over the decades, Frampton’s is different. Together with graduate student Lauris Baum, he came up with a theory that remedies the contrived origin of the Big Bang (and does not predict as gloomy an end to the universe).

Frampton and Baum claim that instead of getting larger and larger until it explodes into nothingness, the universe follows a cyclic model consisting of four stages. First, the universe expands exponentially. Next, while it’s breaking up into vacant patches, the universe comes to a screeching halt and turns around right before the would-be Big Rip; it does this in a unit of time so small that there isn’t even a name for it. Then each patch contracts and eventually bounces back, starting a new universe from one infinitely small causal patch of the last one.

This implies that not only will the universe not end, but that there was no initial Big Bang, and in fact no beginning at all.

Cyclic models have been around for about seventy years, but they could never address the fact that a contraction period inherently means that the universe is contracting and creating order instead of expanding. The Baum-Frampton model solves this problem by explaining that each patch, devoid of any kind of physical matter, has no entropy, and follows the law of thermodynamics. So while the universe may be contracting, there’s nothing actually inside it to contract.

Image courtesy of NASA.

This photograph from the Hubble Space Telecope shows the distortion, or lensing, of light from distant galaxies, an effect caused by gravitional pull of dark matter and dark energy.

Click to read photo caption. Image courtesy of NASA.

Well, nothing tangible, that is. There is something inside these patches; it just can’t be seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelt. Dark energy is an ethereal nothingness that comprises 72 percent of our universe. It was discovered by cosmologists only ten years ago, and is thought to be the culprit in the universe’s accelerated expansion and, ultimately, its impending blowout. It’s also what makes Frampton’s new cosmological model work.

We are now in an expansion period, which Frampton predicts to be 1012 years long. So what would the universe be like during a period of contraction? Pretty boring, it seems. “Nobody would be there to observe it,” he says. “It’s empty, devoid of life. Nothing can survive the turnaround.”

He points out why such an explanation was never envisioned by Albert Einstein, whose research formed the basis of the Big Bang theory (among others). “We don’t think we’re any smarter than Einstein,” Frampton says, “but we just know things that he never knew about.”