[ojciecczas]

And I think you forgot we're just commenting an article on hacker news, not publishing to a physics journal :) By skipping to the metaphor I'm doing a small inception in your minds, you physicists out there. Now this idea will never leave you :)

[monkey_monkey]

I'm pretty sure most physicists are aware of the cyclic universe theory, it's just that there's very little evidence to support it.

[roywiggins]

And are we sure it doesn't predict cosmic strings just as much as the big bang model does? Both involve the universe being very hot and dense in the past and then getting rapidly cooler. That's the part that makes physicists expect cosmic strings, not the question of where the hot-dense state came from in the first place.