[1][2][3][4] It receded from serious consideration in the early 1980s after inflation theory emerged as a solution to the horizon problem, which had arisen from advances in observations revealing the large-scale structure of the universe.
This led cosmologists to seek an explanation to the horizon problem, which questioned how distant regions of the universe could have identical properties without ever being in light-like communication.
The phrase "Big Bounce" appeared in scientific literature in 1987, when it was first used in the title of a pair of articles (in German) in Stern und Weltraum by Wolfgang Priester and Hans-Joachim Blome.
The phrase originated as the title of a novel by Elmore Leonard in 1969, shortly after increased public awareness of the Big Bang model with of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson in 1965.
The idea of the existence of a big bounce in the very early universe has found diverse support in works based on loop quantum gravity.
[14] This result has been generalized to various other models by different groups, and includes the case of spatial curvature, cosmological constant, anisotropies, and Fock quantized inhomogeneities.
[22] This theory extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part, the torsion tensor, as a dynamical variable.
Such an interaction avoids the unphysical Big Bang singularity, replacing it with a cusp-like bounce at a finite minimum scale factor, before which the universe was contracting.
This scenario also explains why the present Universe at the largest scales appears spatially flat, homogeneous, and isotropic, providing a physical alternative to cosmic inflation.
Moreover, curvature perturbations seeded in matter contraction can form a nearly scale-invariant primordial power spectrum and thus provide a consistent mechanism to explain the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations.