from sfgate.com:
Instead of expanding forever, they suggest, the universe is only in the middle-age of its expansion. Eventually it will slow down, pause and then start collapsing until – some 10 to 20 billion years from now – everything in it will end in one infinitely tiny point of mass and energy that cosmologists call a "singularity."

The "singularity" that Linde sees as the ultimate fate of the universe is a kind of absolute nothingness. It is something like what the fate of black holes is supposed to be, crunching together more and more tightly under the force of their own gravity until they, too, become singularities.

That kind of singularity is what many cosmologists consider to be the true origin of the universe at a time just before the Big Bang. Then, in a few billionths of a second, the universe began the extremely rapid phase of inflation that Linde and Alan Guth, now at MIT, proposed more than 20 years ago.

Soon after that, the universe expanded somewhat more sedately, until from its ripples of energy and gravity galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed within a few hundred thousand years. Later the stars gave birth to their circling planets, and ultimately life emerged – at least on one.

Now try reading it again, but this time think of it as a "religious" text, or a religious commentary. That's how I read it.

This is Buddhism, straight from the Lotus Sutra:
The model has its detractors, however. And one alternative has recently been proposed by Paul Steinhardt of Princeton who with Neil Turok of Cambridge University has resurrected a new version of the old cyclic or "oscillating" universe. According to this theory, the universe may not have begun in a single Big Bang, but may be only part of an endless cycle of expansion and rebirth.