Recently, I have been thinking: what makes a person interesting? And my answer is: knowledge. Let me share with you my story. Back in 2019, I started my very first term in Oxford in Teddy Hall (a nickname for St Edmund Hall, which everyone uses). I met a visiting student from China, who was doing his third year in Mathematics. We sometimes had dinner together in the dining hall, with a couple of my other friends. There were a few times where I arrived late for dinner, and met him in the queue too. Those were times where interesting conversations happen. Whenever we dined together, I always took the chance to dig his brains for information, after I found out that he was someone who loved sharing his insights on different topics in life and teaching complex mathematical concepts. Whatever topic I brought up, for example climate change, religion vs science, economics, politics.....he would have concrete stuff to say about it, and often made references to articles, books or prom...
Reading a few science-y books got me thinking about the question of Origin: where did everything come from? What was there before the Big Bang? I went digging around the Internet, hoping to find some interesting theories. But to my disappointment, it seems as if physicists were quite conservative in coming up with theories to answer this question. (Perhaps I should turn to Sci-fi or mythologies to satisfy my thirst for mind-blowing conspiracies.) I have summarised some of the main theories below: Cyclic Model (the Big Bounce) The ancient Hindu cosmology says that the universe is eternal, consisting of infinite series of cycles. In modern cosmology, physicists have come up with similar models as well. One of the famous bounce cosmologist, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, wrote a paper in 2002 on " A Cyclic Model of the Universe " with Neil Turok of Perimeter Institue in Waterloo. We propose a cosmological model in which the universe undergoes an endless seq...