Physicist Ronald Mallett presently leads a controversial time travel research study. But the second law of thermodynamics shows that processes involving heat transfer tend to have one direction and to be irreversible. This law also predicts that the entropy or measure of disorder of an isolated system increases with time.

Lynds claimed: “If all of the laws of physics, with the exception of the second law of thermodynamics, are time symmetric and can equally be reversed, it became apparent that if faced with a situation where entropy might be forced to decrease rather than increase, rather than actually doing so, the order of events should simply reverse, so that the order in which they took place would still be in the direction in which entropy was increasing. The second law would continue to hold, events would remain continuous, and no other law of physics would be contravened.”

No conservation laws would be breached in this cyclic model because it’s only the order of events that gets turned around. We can go to a Saturday cinema matinee and watch a movie shown in reverse with all of its actors walking the wrong way around. But that won’t strangely turn the clock back to Friday. In a related way, Peter Lynds thinks that reversing the order of events near a singularity in respect to entropy does not necessarily mean that the thermodynamic arrow must also reverse. However, it does provide a very good scientific justification for the big bounce.

The distinction between past and future may be irrelevant near a singularity. Yet all time symmetric physical processes apart from the second law of thermodynamics could be reversed to take place in the direction in which entropy is still increasing. In this direction no singularity would be encountered. Events would simply recoil into their equivalent reverse alignments and carry on from where the singularity would have been if the order of events had not turned around.

According to Lynds, it becomes obvious that the big bounce would not only lead events back to the big bang, but it would actually cause it. The universe would then expand, cool, and sooner or later our solar system would take shape again: “If one asks the question, what caused the big bang? The answer here is the big crunch. This is strange enough. But is the big crunch in the past or the future of the big bang? It could equally be said to be either. Likewise, is the big bang in the past or future of the big crunch? Again, it could equally be said to be either. The differentiation between past and future becomes completely meaningless. Moreover, one is now faced with a universe that has neither a beginning nor end in time, but yet is also finite and needs no beginning.”

God from Machine Era

How can the mind of God fit into the cyclic universe? As computers get smarter, machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to a technological singularity. Many scientists take it on faith that machines will sooner or later become conscious. Perhaps the simplest way to achieve this would be to fit existing life forms (such as neurons or microbes) into biocomputer chips. In 1993, the scientist who coined the phrase “technological singularity,” Vernor Vinge, said: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

The Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) is a group of technologists and futurists that explore the accelerating development of special domains in science and venture to weigh up the anticipated technological singularity. The president of the ASF, John Smart, maintains archives on the singularity hypothesis. His latest thoughts relate to information and computation studies and evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology.

Smart and others like him suppose the technological singularity could max out as a “black hole analogous computing system.” According to theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, such a structure is likely to be an integral component in the replicative life cycle of our “evo devo” universe within the multiverse.

In the ancient recitals of Greek tragedy, a projecting crane arm was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage. The Latin phrase “deus ex machina” came from Horace’s advice to dramatists never to draw on a god from the machine to explain their story line. Even so, evolutionary developmental scientists at present hope that two separate processes of Cartesian dualism –– mind and matter –– can work together inside the technological singularity to create a universe. They suggest that the initial conditions of the big bang are the result of an evolutionary selection process involving universe adaptation in the multiverse and universe reproduction via “intelligent black holes.”

Smart and his contemporaries currently propose that “Earth's local intelligence is on the way to forming a black-hole-analogous reproductive system, and then seed (germline) formation to produce another universe within the multiverse.”

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