From Bryn Glover, Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK
Leah Crane quotes Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, as being “very happy” to hear that the idea of a cyclical universe is currently receiving some increasing acceptance. I share the feeling, because I simply cannot get my head around the ideas of infinity and infinitesimal, in the form demanded by other theories (2 May, p 20).
I know that if “time” was created as space-time at the moment of the big bang, then it is meaningless to speak of “time before the big bang”. If there was nothing before the big bang, and that nothingness existed “forever”, then what happened to change things so that time could commence? If, however, something has “always” existed cyclically, then that pesky infinity is still there, but in a form that is emotionally much easier to accept.
