Before The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond in Science and Inquiry

Feb 24, 2024 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, science, astronomy, physics

What a fabulous book! I love science books that are well-written, especially when the author is a practicing scientist with a big story to tell!

Laura Mersini-Houghton grew up in Communist Albania. Her story about life there is not a happy one. Her father, a mathematician, was punished for attending a conference in Western Europe. His punishment was internal exile -- and it could have been much much worse!

Houghton's life story is interspersed with the science in this book. She strikes me as a fre What a fabulous book! I love science books that are well-written, especially when the author is a practicing scientist with a big story to tell!

Laura Mersini-Houghton grew up in Communist Albania. Her story about life there is not a happy one. Her father, a mathematician, was punished for attending a conference in Western Europe. His punishment was internal exile -- and it could have been much much worse!

Houghton's life story is interspersed with the science in this book. She strikes me as a free thinker. She did not follow the crowd. Instead of following her friends and escaping from Albania at the first opportunity, she continued with her undergraduate studies. She was rewarded with a Fulbright scholarship to attend the graduate program at the University of Maryland (my alma mater!) where she earned a Masters degree. She got her PhD from University of Wisconsin, and after some other prestigious academic positions she became an assistant professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina.

In the first part of the book, Houghton lays down the background of cosmology, quantum mechanics and string theory. These various topics become central to her own hypothesis, which she describes in a build-up step by step. First, she describes her theoretical physics research. She explains how her research into the birth of our universe strongly deviates from previous research. For example, Roger Penrose speculated that the probability of our universe existing is astronomically low. Houghton, on the other hand, computed a rather high probability -- so high that it may be possible for other universes to exist as well.

Then Houghton proposes evidence against the anthropic principle, which states that the fundamental physical constants are finely tuned; if any of these constants were slightly different, then the universe either wouldn't be stable, certainly not sufficiently for the development of life. She reasons that a pre-big-bang landscape would allow a vast array of different quantum mechanical wave packets. Those wave packets that occupy high energy states could evolve into a stable universe.

Well, this is a tad beyond me, but the real kicker is when Houghton and her collaborators, Tomo Takahashi and Richard Holman, published a series of papers in 2006 called “Avatars of the Landscape”. Their explorations predicted the existence of multi-verses, that is, multiple universes existing simultaneously. But how in the world could you prove such a thing??? She did! She and her collaborators made some a series of 9 predictions about variability in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background radiation field). She doubted though, that today's technology could observe with enough precsion to confirm or deny the predictions.

Then, the Planck satellite was launched in 2009. By 2013, data from the satellite confirmed their predictions! It is very unlikely that the observed variability in the CMB could be caused by behavior inside our universe! This is not 100% proof of the existence of other universes, but it is a big step in that direction!

I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in cosmology and the big questions about our universe!
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