in which scenario one can see that there were a potential set of conditions waiting to be realized;
The idea that anything might be "waiting" to be realized does tend to constrain reality to our limited dimensions.
If I recall correctly it was Paul Davies who made a very convincing argument along the lines that the bouncing universe idea would work only if absolutely nothing passed from one universe to the next. It is a long time since I read Davies’s book (I could find the ref if anyone is interested), but I remember it because he observed that one might just as well say that a succession of universes existed in parallel as in sequence. This struck me as being odd at first, but in trying to think my way through it I came up with some interesting thoughts, some of which had implications for our understanding of reality. I would be fascinated to hear what others think.
Time and space are, we are told, created anew with each universe. Time has no relevance outside the duration of each universe. Unless there is some form of continuity, which Davies argued that we had to abandon in order to avoid heat death, it makes no sense to talk of one universe following immediately after the other, or of there being a time gap, even the most unthinkably minute instant of time, between the universes, because there is no time between them, not just because one follows the other without a break, but because time cannot exist outside the Universe. It is easy to think that one major difference would be that if the universes existed in sequence there would have to be only one lot of matter and energy, whereas if they all existed at the same time there would have to be very much more matter and energy, perhaps an infinite amount. Undoubtedly, this is so, to some extent, but as we have already seen, if there is absolutely no contact between the universes, there is no way in which the contents of one can be said, necessarily, to be the same as the contents of another, so any discussion about what there would need to be in the way of matter and energy, if we think of many universes existing in parallel would be pure speculation. Furthermore, as time is one of the constituents of each universe, we cannot say if the time in one universe is the same as the time in another, nor can we say with any certainty that it is different. It seems, therefore, that we must regard each universe as existing in a timeless state that has much about it that suggests eternity, and, logically, it makes no sense to talk of things happening in any sort of sequence in eternity, everything must be considered as happening “now”. In the same way that we might reason that light, in a vacuum, travels in such a way that all of its travel is through space, and none through time, so that it is, effectively, everywhere at once, so we must reason that, in eternity everything happens at once. Time and space are simply the consequence of our limited view of reality.
