EKGs, the Universe, and me making discoveries that have been already made

So I'm plugging away at some physiology notes last night. EKGs and heart rhythms and the like. Eventually I get to a lecture on the leads and how they are placed on the chest during an EKG. In a nutshell, if the polarization of the heart is parallel to the lead, it will spike up or down depending on direction, but if it is perpendicular the lead will completely miss the current passed through your heart. That's not important though. What is important, is that it got me thinking about how certain measurements can be effectively masked depending on where you measure them from. My initial response to this idea was a question, but to be quite I honest I don't know why. Said question was:

If you walk a day in forest, and at the end of the day return to your original location, is it absolutely necessary to have traveled in a loop?

I quickly decided the only possibilities to be either a) yes you traveled in a loop, or b) the ground followed you, and you traveled in a line. The loop answer intrigued me, because you undoubtedly would move, but never reach any new finish point. And then in a gigantic storm of lightning bolts erupting from my head, I realized that if we apply this thinking to time, everything makes sense. Essentially I came to the following conclusion:

1. The universe is expanding in 3 dimensions, X,Y,Z. Each dimension is analogous to the planes of a 3D graph.
2. The fourth dimension is time. Time dictates XYZ based on a temporal measurement. At any time XYZ will have a specific value.
3. As the universe expands, so does time. Thus we can plot the expansion of the universe as a function of time expanding in unison.
4. At some point the universe will reach its maximum distance from (0,0,0), and will begin to retract.
5. When the universe begins to retract, time will also retract with it. This will cause time to flow backwards.
6. Eventually the universe will erupt again and time will flow forward.

Essentially this explained to me why humans have such a difficult time quantifying the extent of the universe and time. We hear question like "What lies outside the edge of the universe?", or "what came before god?". We ask these questions because we naively see time a finite, forward-only measurement. On our graph, time never follows XYZ according to this line of thinking. Instead it just meanders aimlessly as a ray. Instead, think of time as circular. Think of it as a ball on a string that spins around and around, almost like a bola. If you look at it from the side, you simply see a ball moving back and fourth. This is analogous to how we see it, except our reference point is so temporally small that we see only a fraction of the spin; all we see is the ball moving forward or backward for an infinitesimally small stretch of a revolution. Thus, it appears as the ball is simply moving forward in an infinite ray. Instead, think of time as the picture of the ball from above or below. Its path is a circle that extends away from a point and returns to its origin. I think this is how time works. It simply moves in a circle from the moment the universe begins to expand, to the moment it begins to contract, and to the moment it reaches the start point again.

What does this explain? A lot, I think. If someone asks, "what lies outside of the universe?" don't think of the question in terms of XYZ, think of it in terms of our circular time. In this situation outside the universe corresponds to a point in which time doesn't exist, because it never makes it that far. Thus, there is no outside the universe. Alternatively, "before god" corresponds to before existence, which subsequently means before explosion of the universe. In other words, what happens before a circular revolution of time begins? Simply the end of another revolution. Think about it, it would explain a lot. Unfortunately, my thoughts of single handedly being the first person to decipher the universe were not to be, and a quick google search has shown that the idea has existed for a while. On the flipside, though, I must admit it felt good to put together some pieces I didn't think would ever fall together. Even if I wasn't the first.

It makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, understanding existence is possible to understand from our vantage point on Earth. Maybe "Lecture 21: Blood Flow Dynamics" holds the next key. Somehow I doubt it.