Coming from a relatively uneducated scientifically curious mind, forgive me if my question seems ignorant / redundant. I'm aware of the Big Crunch theory, that once at capacity, the universe may collapse in on itself - Hawking once theorized that time may go backwards during this crunch. So that got me thinking, how would we perceive backward time? That lead me to my question: considering what we know about thermodynamics, relativity and entropy, is it scientifically plausible that the universe is not currently expanding, but is actually in the process of a Big Crunch, and that we are simply perceiving time as moving forward, kind of like the way your eyes see the world upside down but your brain corrects the image? What could the implications of this be? Would any phenomena that we've observed in the universe make more sense from the perspective of this theory?

I'm aware of the Big Crunch theory, that once at capacity, the universe may collapse in on itself. Hawking once theorized that time may go backwards during this crunch. So, that got me thinking: how would we perceive backward time? 

That leads me a question: considering what we know about thermodynamics, relativity and entropy, is it scientifically plausible that the universe is not currently expanding, but is actually in the process of a Big Crunch, and that we are simply perceiving time as moving forward, kind of like the way your eyes see the world upside down but your brain corrects the image? 

What could the implications of this be? Would any phenomena that we've observed in the universe make more sense from the perspective of this theory?