High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The oscillating universe theory is a cosmological model investigated briefly by Albert Einstein in 1930 and critiqued by Richard Tolman in 1934, in which the universe undergoes a series of oscillations, each beginning with a big bang and ending with a big crunch. After the big bang, the universe expands for a while before the gravitational attraction of matter causes it to collapse back in and undergo a bounce.