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A world egg or cosmic egg is a mythological motif used in the creation myths of many cultures and civilizations. Typically, the cosmic egg is a beginning of some sort, and the universe or some primordial being came into existence by coming out of the cosmic egg.
The cosmic egg is also a cosmological concept developed in the 1930s and explored by theoreticians during the following two decades. The idea comes from a perceived need to reconcile Edwin Hubble's observation of an expanding universe (which is also predicted by Einstein's equations of general relativity) with the notion that the universe must be eternally old.
The theory maintains that many billions of years ago, the entire mass of the universe was compressed into a volume about thirty times the size of our sun, from which it expanded to its current state (the Big Bang). The theory also maintains that gravity is gradually slowing the cosmic expansion, and that at some future point the universe will again contract into another cosmic egg (the Big CrunchIn cosmology, the Big Crunch is a hypothesis that states the universe will stop expanding and start to collapse upon itself; a counterpart to the Big Bang. If the gravitational attraction of all the matter in the observable horizon is high enough, then it). The universe will then "bounce back" into another phase of expansion, and the process will repeat itself indefinitely.
A rival attempt to reconcile an eternal universe with cosmic expansion is the steady state theoryFor alternative meanings see steady state (disambiguation). The steady state theory is a model developed in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and others as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. Although the model had a large number of supporters among cosm developed by Fred HoyleSir Fred Hoyle ( June 24, 1915 August 20, 2001) was a British astronomer, notable for a number of his theories that run counter to current astronomical opinion, and a writer of science fiction, including a number of books co-authored by his son Geoffrey H and others. According to Hoyle, no such event as the big bang ever occurred, and cosmic expansion is itself eternal; new matter is continuously created to maintain a constant density. Both theories stand in opposition to the more recent no boundary model proposed by Stephen HawkingReuters/Stephen Hird Stephen William Hawking, CH CBE FRS (born January 8 1942) is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. Hawking is Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a post once held by Isaac Newton). Biography, in which spacetimeIn special relativity and general relativity, time and three-dimensional space are treated together as a single four-dimensional manifold called spacetime . A point in spacetime may be referred to as an event . Each event has four coordinates t x y z ; or emerged from a singularity in the big bang. In this model, any question of what happened "before" the big bang is meaningless, since time itself was created at this instant.