A Fresh Look at the Cosmological Singularity

Abstract

WE consider homogeneous Newtonian universes expanding or contracting with shear and rotation. Because of the absence of explicit solutions of Einstein's equations for expanding rotating models the Newtonian approach is likely to continue to be helpful. The problem was first tackled by Heckmann and Shucking1,2 following the early work of McCrea and Milne3 for isotropic Newtonian universes. Heckmann and Shucking concluded that collapse to a singularity could be avoided by the inclusion of spin. This was later contested by Narlikar4, who claimed that it was not possible to get nonsingular finitely oscillating models on the basis of Newtonian theory.