Is this an established theory for the origins of the universe?

Question

I typed this up myself, but I'm pretty sure I read it a while ago in a scientific journal. Has a theory like this already been proposed and studied?

"A cyclical model for the universe would solve for the problems presented by the second law of thermodynamics. In each contraction, the universe would collapse into a point of zero size and infinite density before exploding into a new universe. No new matter would be created in each cycle, but the energy would be reset from the pre-collapse state of maximum entropy to a post-expansion state of minimum entropy. This is made possible by the fact that at a point of zero size and infinite density, the second law of thermodynamics would break down to the point that it no longer has any effect on the energy of the matter in the point."

Answer 1

That was a common theory before they discovered the universe is not cyclical. New measurements show that not only is the universe expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. Everyone assumed it exploded from a tiny start and has been slowing down ever since, but that perfectly logical assumption turns out to be false. The universe will continue expanding faster and faster until it tears every atom in it apart.

Which brings me to my gut feeling, totally non-scientific theory that just seems reasonable based solely on the fact that the expansion is accelerating. Maybe the universe has no beginning or end in time. It didn't start as a singularity and at some point in time start expanding. It has always been expanding, forever. Go farther into the past and it is smaller but expanding more slowly. Maybe 20 billion years ago it was 1 inch across and expanding at one inch a year, then 19 billion years ago it was one mile in size and expanding at one foot a year. A trillion trillion years ago it was smaller than an atom and expanding at an angstrom a year. On and on into the past for an infinite number of years. It was never zero size or not expanding. Different laws of physics would dominate the universe in the distant past but those laws *could* have resulted in a universe every bit as diverse and interesting to its hypothetical intelligent inhabitants as ours is today. Those beings would be extremely small and live at incredible speed, with lifetimes measured in fractions of a second, so to them the 1 inch universe would seem large. And in the distant future when the universe is billions of times larger than it is now and expanding faster than our speed of light, physics will again be different, but self consistent and diverse in their own way. Those future inhabitants might be collections of energy fields larger than out whole universe today that live for millions of years, so that their universe seems no bigger to them than ours does to us. So the expansion goes on forever into the past and future, with the universe constantly and profoundly changing but never having any start or end, never having been zero size and never reaching any maximum size.

But it is just a thought.