that was part of the idea the big crunch. The thing is once the Big Bang was theorised, people tried to figure it out. The Big Crunch stipulates that eventually gravity of all the material in the universe will pull everything together and basically return everything to the conditions right before the big bang, ending the universe in a crunch.

So, let's try and make a predictions out of this hypothesis, how would it work? and what would we expect to see in the universe that would affirm it?

Well, the idea is that the moment the Big Bang happens, everything is thrown in all directions and begins to slow down, much like with a rock that you throw, the moment a propelant is spent it slows down, because there's something that resists it – i.e. gravity. So, what we should be seeing is that galaxies away from us should be slowing down, or starting to even reverse their direction of travel (but that would be typical of a much older universe). And that's exactly what scientists were looking for.

But guess what they found? The universe isn't slowing down, it's actually accelerating. I'm talking that since that first observation, about fourty years of further observations confirm the same findings. There are areas of uncertainty there, but the evidence that the universe does not slow down is rather consistent.

But to your other point, we are still trying to figure out reality. How big is the universe really? how is it shaped – i.e. is it flat or is it curving (our current observations say it's flat), so on and so forth, and there are more and more scientists that stipulate that there are more universes out there that we can't see or interact with, at least not yet. I think they didn't make any workable prediction that one can measure and draw any conclusions from, but you're not alone in this. Still, our understanding of the universe is incomplete, and is evolving. It's just based on theories that correlated with observation and science.