We love ourselves too often and need reach out much more often. It is a social responsibility and it effects the environment also.
It is with great timing that I entered the common street of copper. And walked through it I came to a gate where a man waited for me. He was much older than myself and in a civil war uniform. He told me to sit down and eat some of his bread and write a poem . This is what it said:
Skip to content Your account Search the website Enter search keywords Light Curiosity engine Events Tours Shop News Features Newsletters Podcasts Video Comment Culture Games | This week's magazine Health Space Physics Technology Environment Mind Humans Life Mathematics Chemistry Earth Society Explore our newsletters Columnist and Space The rise, the fall and the rebound of cyclic cosmology Cyclic cosmology, or the big bounce, is the idea that the universe will eventually crunch back together and then go through another big bang. Columnist Leah Crane finds that, appropriately, it’s coming back By Leah Crane 17 April 2026 The largest 3D map of our universe to date, with Earth at the center and every dot showing a galaxy DESI collaboration and KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor The universe is dead; long live the universe. Not right at this moment, not yet. But one day everything we know will be gone. The cities we build, the lakes we swim in, the planet we live on, the solar system we inhabit, the star we orbit and every star we don’t – they’re all headed towards an inescapable finale. Read more A new kind of hidden black hole may explain the mystery of dark energy Advertisement At the end of it all, what happens? Some say our ever-expanding universe will slow down and then one day do a cosmic U-turn, undoing all the growth that has happened since the big bang. Eventually, everything will crunch together into the tiniest possible space and then explode out again in a riot of rebirth – that’s the idea we call cyclic cosmology, or the big bounce. It’s been around for a long time, and the idea itself has faced a trajectory that mirrors its contents. It was briefly popular in the mid-20th century, fell from favour, and now it may be making a comeback thanks to new data from the largest 3D map of the universe ever created, made by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). As is occasionally the case with grand cosmological hypotheses, proponents of cyclic cosmology mostly preferred it for its elegance: if the universe is cyclic, that means we probably don’t have to worry about what precipitated the big bang or what existed before it – those near-impossible questions are already answered. There’s a beautiful sense of symmetry to the whole thing. Catherine Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, expressed it nicely during a recent New Scientist subscriber event I hosted, where she said, “It really gels with me that the universe sort of is created in a big bang, it expands, it slows down, gravity pulls it back in on itself, there’s a big crunch, there’s another big bang and it expands… This just makes me very happy.” At the same event, Adam Riess, who won a Nobel for his and his colleagues’ discovery of dark energy, put forward one of the more concrete reasons for many cosmologists’ fondness for the idea. “We like it because it tells us that this is not a special time that we live in or the one-shot universe,” he said. In other words, in a cyclic universe it wouldn’t be quite such an unbelievable coincidence that we’re here at all to ponder these things. Personally, I don’t think the idea that times like this happen over and over again – perhaps not in every bounce but definitely in more than one – with all the right conditions for life and trees and rockets to the moon, makes it that much less special, but I digress. Maybe that’s more of an anthropocentric, emotional position than one based on the laws of physics. Subscriber-only newsletter Sign up to Lost in Space-Time Untangle mind-bending physics, maths and the weirdness of reality with our monthly, special-guest-written newsletter. Sign up to newsletter New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine. For a long time, cyclic cosmology fell out of favour, driven partly by Riess’s work showing that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. If the space between the stars is growing faster and faster, it feels unlikely that it will eventually shrink back down to nothing again. Gravity just isn’t strong enough to counteract dark energy. “Unfortunately, all of the measurements that we make tell us that there just isn’t enough mass in the universe to pull it back together,” said Heymans. “At the moment, the evidence is pointing towards a very cold and sad and empty death for our universe.” This idea, called the heat death, is now the most accepted version of what is to come. There are various other reasons that the big bounce faded into relative obscurity, largely to do with problems that arise when we try to sort out how matter, energy and entropy might be recycled or destroyed in the moment between bounces. The second law of thermodynamics is a sticking point: it says that disorder, or entropy, in a closed system (such as the universe, as far as we know) can never decrease. With an expanding universe, that’s easy to square – we would just see a continual slow increase in entropy over the lifetime of the cosmos. But if the universe starts contracting again, entropy would correspondingly start to decrease. There are ways around this, generally involving pushing the problem off into the next cycle of expansion and contraction. If the universe gets bigger in each cycle, entropy is still increasing overall. But if you extrapolate backwards or forwards in time enough, you end up in the same situation as before. We still start with a big bang at the beginning of the universe and an eventual heat death at the end, it’s just a more complicated, stepwise path between the two. Another way around the entropy problem was popularised in the 2010s by legendary theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, of Penrose triangle fame. His model is called conformal cyclic cosmology, and it would look exactly like an ever-expanding universe… right until the very end. As the universe expands and everything gets further and further from everything else, matter will decay into its composite parts, and eventually everything will just be leftover photons floating in the abyss. That’s not particularly controversial. But what Penrose proposed next is. His idea is that the extreme emptiness and uniformity of space-time at the end of one cycle, or aeon, is the same as the structure we’d expect at the very beginning of a new aeon. The idea behind conformal cyclic cosmology is that thanks to this functionally identical structure (and some very complicated maths), a new, expanding universe can be kicked off from the frigid remains of the previous one. The idea is niche and difficult (bordering on impossible) to test. Penrose has proposed some potentially measurable bits of evidence for it, but on the whole, cosmologists tend to find them unconvincing. However, it hasn’t been disproven either, and the fact that it manages to get around the entropy problem means that it shouldn’t be simply discarded, even if it is widely viewed with scepticism. So, we’re stuck without much of a way to apply these ideas to the real universe we live in. The Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, which is used by DESI to survey the stars DESI Collaboration/DOE/KPNO/NOIR Enter DESI. Its enormous map of the universe has shown that dark energy, which previously looked like it would only grow in strength forever, seems to be weakening. That is, the outward acceleration of the universe appears to be slowing. As Heymans stressed during the event, this does not mean that the universe is coming back together – it’s still accelerating in its expansion, just not quite as quickly. Still, this is a radical shift in our understanding of dark energy, and it could well kick off an era of new theories about the way our cosmos will spend its final days. And among those new theories, cyclic cosmologies seem to be rising once again. “What could be causing dark energy to change could mean that in another 10 billion years’ time, dark energy weakens so much that it does reverse and it does pull everything back in on itself, which would be lovely,” said Heymans. The problem with knowing what it all means is that we don’t understand a massive proportion of the universe. Dark energy makes up nearly 70 per cent of all the matter and energy in the entire cosmos; it controls the ultimate fate of everything, and yet we have no idea what it is or how it works. On cosmological time scales, we just met – Reiss and his colleagues only identified it less than 30 years ago. “Without understanding the nature of the dark energy that’s driving the present acceleration, it’s very difficult to extrapolate it into the future. Will it weaken?” said Riess. “I would say all bets are off about the future.” Smart money may still be on a cold and empty end of the universe, but, for the first time in a century, it might also be worth placing a long-shot wager on the big bounce.
Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation 🎗️ @AuschwitzJCF · Dec 14, 2025 Replying to @MichealMartinTD Condemnations of antisemitic violence ring hollow when detached from accountability. For months, Ireland’s government has relentlessly singled out Israel while failing to meaningfully confront antisemitism at home. Jewish warnings that demonizing the world’s only Jewish state would not remain confined to rhetoric were dismissed. They were right. Antisemitic violence does not arise in a vacuum. It is fueled by narratives that portray Jewish self-defense as criminal, Jewish suffering as conditional, and Jewish identity as collective guilt. When such narratives are normalized by political leaders, they help legitimize the hatred those same leaders later claim to oppose. Expressions of sympathy after attacks are not moral leadership. If Ireland’s leaders genuinely wish to stand against antisemitism, they must confront the consequences of their own words and actions and abandon rhetoric that isolates and delegitimizes Jews through Israel. Anything less is not solidarity. It is hypocrisy.
Antisemitism doesn’t begin with violence. It begins with normalization. Condemning the former while excusing the latter is moral evasion. Antisemitism in America isn’t just imported by a few radicals, it’s been platformed and legitimized by people with power and influence.
Cemil Kerimoglu 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @cemk_cemil · Apr 15 https://substack.com/home/post/p-194290585 Europe finds itself at a fateful juncture, yet its own decision-making machinery lets a single malicious actor paralyze the whole. In aiming to protect the smaller nations, the unanimity principle was essentially catering to petty nationalism. Eventually, it has become the liberum veto of our time - the same institution that once destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and wiped it off the map. Even the very thought itself that small European nations need "protection" against larger ones is flawed and deeply malicious. This new essay argues that abolishing the veto is thus not merely a procedural tweak. It is a philosophical act: the moment Europeans finally choose to see themselves as Europeans, and Europe as more than the sum of its parts. Abolish the veto!
Azad Essa @azadessa · Mar 14 A reminder that our best selling children’s book, ‘From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book’, has been banned from sale and distribution in France following false accusations of antisemitism from the French Zionist right.
I expect more effort to stop antisemitism, not simply because it should be done, but because of antisemitism, but because it is an alarm bell of all kinds of problems lingering. If world war two meant anything? And laws could be passed and nothing might change, more violence and more hate?
Yes, France took a notable (though ultimately unsuccessful) parliamentary action against antisemitism as recently as yesterday (April 16, 2026).What HappenedFrench lawmakers, led by centrist MP Caroline Yadan (from President Macron's centrist coalition), had prepared the so-called Yadan bill (or PPL Yadan / Bill 575) for debate in the National Assembly on April 16–17, 2026. The bill aimed to combat what its supporters described as "new forms of antisemitism" that have surged since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and the ensuing Israel-Gaza war. france24.com Key proposed measures included:Expanding the offense of "glorification of terrorism" or "incitement to terrorism" to cover implicit justifications. Creating a new offense for publicly calling for the destruction of a state recognized by France (widely seen as targeting slogans like "From the river to the sea" or explicit calls to eliminate Israel). Penalizing excessive trivialization of terrorist acts or comparisons of Israel to the Nazis. Supporters argued this was necessary to address evolving antisemitic rhetoric that existing laws (which already criminalize direct incitement and Holocaust denial) do not fully cover, amid a documented rise in antisemitic incidents in France.The OutcomeAt the last minute on April 16, 2026, the bill's backers withdrew it before the scheduled debate, as it became clear it lacked sufficient votes to pass. This followed:Massive public opposition, including a petition that gathered over 700,000 signatures. Protests and criticism from left-wing parties, UN human rights experts, academics, and free-speech advocates who warned the bill risked conflating legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies with antisemitism, potentially chilling pro-Palestinian speech and activism. en.wikipedia.org The government has indicated it will introduce a revised or similar bill in late June 2026.Broader ContextThis episode occurs against a backdrop of ongoing high levels of antisemitic acts in France (Europe's largest Jewish community). French authorities continue to enforce existing laws through arrests, investigations, and public condemnations. President Macron has also spoken out strongly against antisemitism and called for measures like mandatory electoral bans for officials guilty of it.In short, France's most recent high-profile action was this attempted legislative push, which was halted yesterday due to lack of support—but the issue remains very much alive, with plans for a follow-up bill soon. The debate highlights deep divisions in France over how to balance fighting hate with protecting free expression.
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