What the hell does that mean? Physicists seem to think they can just casually throw that out there as if it explains something.

"We found that the universe passes smoothly through the singularity and out the other side. That was our hope, but we'd never really accomplished this before."

...

"We know that in the first 50,000 years the universe was essentially just filled with radiation," says Anna Ijjas, a physicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the research. "The normal matter we see now was not really very significant. I think a scaleless early universe is actually very much suggested by our current measurements."

Under those conditions Turok and Gielen found that the contracting universe would never actually become a singularity--essentially it would "tunnel through" the worrisome point by hopping from a state right before it to a state right after it. Although such sidestepping sounds like cheating, it is a proved phenomenon in quantum mechanics. Because particles do not exist in absolute states but rather hazes of probability there is a small but real chance they can "tunnel" through physical barriers to reach locations seemingly off-limits to them--the equivalent, on a microscopic scale, of walking through walls. "The fuzziness in space and time and the matter conspires to make it uncertain where the universe is at a given time," Turok explains. "This allows the universe to pass through the singularity."

They're talking about the fuzziness of space and time and matter. And this somehow makes it possible to just skip over that annoying part of the calculation that can't be solved. It totally sounds like cheating. Although, most of quantum physics sounds like cheating to me, so shows what i know.

Of lesser fantasticness to me is the main thrust of the article which is the theory that the universe didn't start with a bang, but initially contracted before expanding out.

But an underdog idea posits that the birth of this universe was not actually the beginning--that an earlier version of spacetime had existed and contracted toward a "big crunch," then flipped and started expanding into what we see today. Now a new study suggesting a twist on this "bounce" scenario has supporters excited and inflation proponents newly inflamed over a "rival" they say they have repeatedly disproved, only to have it keep bouncing back.