I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas

If you lie beneath an obelisk and look up to see drifting clouds, the obelisk appears to be moving. This is just one of the side effects of our brain's solution to creating the universe in our heads without having to jam in a representation of each and every particle of the actual cosmos.

Anyhoo...Steven Hawking proposed that our universe is just one of a sequence of universes that are created in a Big Bang, expand to a limit, contract to a singularity, which triggers the next Big Bang and universe and so on and so forth. (Like a string of saugages - Hawking's analogy not mine) He also proposed that while the universe is expanding; entropy increases. That is the energy and particles in the universe tend to become more amorphous or randomly and evenly distributed.

So our perception of an expanding universe is dependent on our perception of entropy increasing. But what if, like the flying obelisk, it is only a perception and we got it wrong and entropy is decreasing and the universe is contracting. With no external framework to reference how do we know either way.

Spike...where are you, Spike? ~sings~ I'm walking backwards for Christmas.