Bouncing cosmologies, where a prior contracting phase gives rise to expansion,
Cyclic universes, as in ekpyrotic or conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC),
Emergent cosmologies, where the universe originates from a quasi-static state.
These approaches offer attractive solutions to:
Singularity avoidance via quantum gravity or modified gravity corrections,
Horizon and flatness problems without inflation,
Embedding cosmology within a geodesically complete spacetime.
However, many cyclic or bouncing models suffer from fine-tuning issues, entropy accumulation, or dependence on speculative fields (e.g., ghost condensates, phantom energy). Additionally, their capacity to explain observed anisotropies and early structure formation is limited unless supplemented by complex mechanisms for entropy reset or mode filtering.
Our Blink Universe approach extends this line of reasoning by incorporating spacetime tunneling and quantum probabilistic emergence as a non-singular genesis mechanism, avoiding many of these theoretical pitfalls.
4. Universe-as-Black-Hole and Holographic Models
Some radical proposals reinterpret the observable universe as the interior of a black hole, leveraging the mathematical similarities between the Schwarzschild metric and cosmological horizons. Others adopt a holographic viewpoint, inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence and Bekenstein--Hawking entropy bounds.
These models suggest that:
The degrees of freedom of the universe scale with area, not volume,
Spacetime geometry may emerge from quantum entanglement and error correction (as seen in tensor network models and holographic codes),
Black hole thermodynamics offers clues about cosmological entropy and initial conditions.
Such perspectives have led to new developments in qubit-geometrization, AdS cosmologies, and the idea that information, rather than matter or geometry, is the primary substrate of physical reality.
While holography is still largely restricted to asymptotically AdS spacetimes, emerging research on de Sitter holography, complexity-action dualities, and bulk reconstruction increasingly support the view that information-theoretic constraints shape cosmological evolution.
This direction forms a key pillar of our theoretical framework, wherein information becomes the ontological primitive and spacetime, geometry, and matter emerge as contextual projections across multilayered informational networks.
Synthesis
These alternative cosmological models demonstrate a growing recognition that the CDM model---though successful as a first-order approximation---may be incomplete at both infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) scales. The persistence of observational anomalies and theoretical paradoxes motivates a conceptual shift toward models that:
