Here's some speculation I've been thinking about, which may be of some interest to you, just for fun though I'd be interested in constructive feedback.
Some researchers believe the known universe may be constrained by an event horizon. so if this is the case there'd be an 'inside' and an 'outside' and outside could be called the metaverse / multiverse if you like.
Ie the universe in this conception started as an expanding black hole. As a black hole expands, density continually decreases, in line with the Schwarzchild equations, so given a measure of the known universe's density you can calculate the size it can be.
Black holes grow by addition of mass/energy from the outside, but due to time dilation near the event horizon, the actual mechanism is that matter approaches the event horizon, and the event horizion swells outwards (as there is now a new equilibrium point), so the black hole stretches out, with all points within the black hole stretched apart. This stretching effect would in effect counterbalance the inward effect of gravity in a dynamic equilibrium (with a cycle time of 10's of billions of years).
Dark energy under this cosmology could be the matter which exists in the region outside our event horizion. That matter is infalling as the last remnants of a previous big crunch, and paradoxically when it approaches the event horizion it is causing the area inside the event horizon to stretch. The infalling mass/energy is converted into gravitic potential energy within the event horizion.
To sum up, as the matter outside the event horizon runs out, the expansion will slow, and then reverse, and lead to the formation of new event horizion(s) to expand.
So this would be a form of cyclic universe, but it's not a case of expand-and-contract as totally separate phases : the contraction of the out section coincides with, and fuels, the expansion of the next cycle.
Edited by jasonlang, : No reason given.
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