A new study by Martin Bojowald, a theorist at the Pennsylvania State University, and colleagues suggests that with each big bang, the universe mostly forgets its past and starts anew.

The model showed that most, but not all, of the information about what came before the big bang gets irretrievably lost through the big bang transition. And in a perpetual cycle of big bangs and crunches, this information loss means no two universes are ever the same. Bojowald calls this “cosmic forgetfulness.”