The Big Crunch could have been before the Big Bang!

[Fay]

Scientists claim, today, that our universe could have been built on the shattered remnants of an older universe.

The previous universe was similar to ours but collapsed in on itself in an event nicknamed, The Big Crunch.

It has always been difficult to explain how a universe was created from nothing, & this theory could explain some of the missing gaps about the begining  of our universe.
A team from Penn State University in the USA, believes this is part of the puzzle.

More: http://www.physorg.com/news102516861.html

[Rick]

So it turns out that the universe didn't begin with a big bang, after all. No. It was a big boing, the result of a previous universe contracting before bouncing back out to become ours. This is the latest news from the mutantly clever quantum cosmologists at Penn State university.

The boffins have have used a piece of mathematical trickery called Quantum Loop Theory to go where no one has gone before: into the singularity that classical cosmology says preceded the Big Bang. What they found was that the singularity actually wasn't.

More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/02/quantum_loop_universe/