Guth showed that, according to the second law, the entropy (or disorder) of the matter and energy in the universe would increase over time in each cycle. But such increases in entropy (or the disorderly distribution of mass-energy) would result in less energy available to do work in each cycle. That would cause progressively longer and longer cycles of expansion and contraction, since increasing inhomogeneities in the mass-energy density throughout space would decrease the efficiency of gravitational contraction.
