The Pulsating Universe

We live in an era of cosmological revolution. The 2015 discovery of gravitational waves generated by merging of multiple black holes of stellar-mass closes the problem of “dark matter” whose existence could not be explained for more than half a century. This discovery led to the creation of a model of an oscillating universe, in which gravitational radiation and black holes play a key role. Stephen Hawking believed that nothing before the Big Bang could affect us. We believe he was wrong: the history of the universe before the Big Bang is important for our cosmological cycle, and relics of past cycles are generously scattered around. The main relic objects are massive black holes. This book is the first to describe cyclic cosmology, which explains the physical mechanism of the Big Bang and the current acceleration of the expansion of the universe (the phenomenon of the positive cosmological constant or “dark energy”). A popular presentation of the key problems of cosmology and their solution using the theory of an oscillating universe is available to the wide audience. The appendix section contains a comprehensive mathematical description of an oscillating universe with variable gravitational mass.

Nikolai Gorkavy. The Pulsating Universe. — St. Petersburg: Piter, 2024.