Interesting paragraph which describes how observations could determine the origins of our universe:<p>> So far, the calculations have concerned the spatial patterns that could arise from cosmic inflation. Alternative theories of the birth of the universe would be expected to have different higher-point signatures. In the last five years, there’s been a renewed interest in bounce cosmology, which recasts the Big Bang as a Big Bounce from a previous era. The new symmetry-based approach might be useful for distinguishing between the higher-point correlations of a universe that inflated and one that bounced. “The mechanism would be different; the symmetries are different,” Pimentel said. “They would have a different menu of cosmological correlations.”