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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 4630452" data-attributes="member: 177">Reductio ad absurdum has its place.  If their redefinition for effect is okay, mine should also be.  The fact that you hate mine shows there's a problem with the idea of redefining the term.   What is good for the goose is good for the gander, and all that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I would be fine with that, if it was being redefined by those who actually do the science.  Scientists redefine stuff all the time, and I'm cool with it.  I am far less sanguine about it being done by the press for the purposes of a good headline.The term you're looking for is probably, "hypothesis".  To be a "theory" a model has to make testable predictions, and so far the cyclical universe and brane models currently don't make any of which I'm aware.Basically, these things are not currently falsifiable - such models can be very useful to work on, as they may eventually become theory - but until then, we should not be be using them in science reporting as if they were accepted theory.So, right now, cosmologists still work with a singularity at the origin.  Freyar is correct - a correct theory of quantum gravity might bust that singularity, but we don't have such yet.  We have a collection of untestable models.</blockquote>

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