Does the new Cyclic Theory violate the second law of thermodynamics?
No. The second law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy or randomness in the universe always increases. This is true for the new Cyclic Theory. A thorough discussion of this in Chapter 8 of our book, including its relation to Isaac Asimov’s famous short story, The Last Question (which is also the title of our Chapter). There is actually a common misunderstanding regarding this issue. The problem with the oscillatory models of the 1920’s was not the entropy, but the entropy density — that is, not the total amount of randomness but, rather, how concentrate it is. In the oscillatory models of the 1920s, the entropy created during one expansion phase draws together during the periods of contraction and adds to the concentration of entropy at the beginning of the next cycle. If the concentration increases from cycle to cycle, then each cycle ends up being longer than the one before (going forward in time) or the cycles get progressively shorter (extrapolating backward in time). In
