Hello Eclogite
as for an and and,,,,,,,,,,,,,,i think you can work that one for yourself.
you asked for "Please provide some citations for this intriguing idea."
Entropy does not apply to the universe it may apply to its parts. As part of a recycling process.
The universe will never collapse to a singularity its parts will go through a cycle and part of this cycle is the singularity. All the parts will never ever collapse to a single point in sapce.
As for the Big Bang theory its only a theory which does not stack up.
Its amazing that so many people are talking about the Big Bang Theory and actually think that it happened. Its only a thoery.
In the last few years or should I say decades the Big Bang has been put on the back burner as a theory that once was. Still the amount of people that talk about it is over 60 % which says to us there must be something to it or we have been lead up the garden path for a long time and we have developed habits of thinking along the lines of the Big Bang and as you know habits are hard to stop and change.
read these links
http://www.fixall.org/bigbang/bigblackbang.htm
quote
Cosmology is the scientific study of the beginnings of our Universe. Theories have been devoloped by cosmologists to explain how the Universe came about. One theory, the Big Bang theory, while acknowledged by the theorists to be just a theory, has come to be accepted by most mainstream scientists and subsequently by most of the public. However, a careful reading of the originators of these theories reveals that they, the authors, consider the theory to be an assumption. A serious error of great import occurs, however, when secondary observers assume the assumption is fact. For when the theory eventually filters down to the public, the theory is taken as the truth.
http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org/
one example from the many
quote
" Light Element Abundances predict contradictory densities
The Big bang theory predicts the density of ordinary matter in the universe from the abundance of a few light elements. Yet the density predictions made on the basis of the abundance of deuterium, lithium-7 and helium-4 are in contradiction with each other, and these predictions have grown worse with each new observation. The chance that the theory is right is now less than one in one hundred trillion"
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bang.html
quote
Religious circles embraced the idea of an expanding universe because for the universe to be expanding, then at some point in the past it had to originate from a single point, called the Big Bang". The "Big Bang" coincided nicely with religious doctrine and just as had been the case with epicycles (and despite the embarrassment thereof) religious institutions sought to encourage this new model of the universe over all others, including the then prevalent "steady state" theory."
http://www.rense.com/general53/bbng.htm
quote
"Cosmology Statement.org (Published in New Scientist, May 22-28 issue, 2004, p. 20)
The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory.
In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, RAISE SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE VALIDITY OF THE UNDERLYING THEORY.
But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation. "
But there is more as the man would say.
