How boxed in is cosmology by the cosmological principle? If we - as an example - didn't assume the cosmological constant was constant and expected it to vary over large distances, could we arrive at a working model of the universe? maybe high density dark matter/energy regions are the same as regions of high/low values of the CC. It's late.
edit; did some digging - looks like its actually and active area: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=13446...
I heard about big bounce/crunch models before, but thought they were discounted due to the acceleration of expansion, which suggests that gravity will not lead to a contraction. Does anyone understand how this new bounce model deals with that problem?
If inflation is naturally fast early, this model is already better than the previous bounce/crunch versions.
Unrelated but related - where does a ‘god’ fit into all of this? In other words, why do people and various religions still believe that ‘god’ made the universe? Heaven and earth?
Somehow this seems more intuitively "right" than a single Big Bang event, and raises fewer cosmological questions.
Press release the Telegraph story is based on:
https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/new-theory...
Arxiv version of the paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23877v1