[2] Steinhardt created the name based on the Ancient Greek word ekpyrosis (ἐκπύρωσις, "conflagration"), which refers to a Stoic cosmological model in which the universe is caught in an eternal cycle of fiery birth, cooling and rebirth.
[citation needed] This is important because when the effects of quantum fluctuations are properly included in the Big Bang inflationary model, they prevent the universe from achieving the uniformity and flatness that the cosmologists are trying to explain.
Instead of making clear predictions, the Big Bang inflationary theory allows any outcome, so that the properties we observe may be viewed as random chance, resulting from the particular patch of the multiverse in which the Earth resides.
In ekpyrotic and cyclic models, smoothing and flattening occurs during a period of slow contraction, so quantum fluctuations are not inflated and cannot produce a multiverse.
As a result, the ekpyrotic and cyclic models predict simple physical properties that are consistent with current experimental evidence without producing a multiverse.