Albania was cut off from the rest of the world until the collapse of the communist regime in 1991. She won a scholarship to study in the US in 1994 after being influenced by her father's interest in mathematics. She writes about her quest to illuminate the origins of our universe and prove that we are one of many universes in a vast multiverse in her first book. Mersini-Houghton is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spends her summers in Cambridge, England.
I believe that life in a closed society encouraged a greater love for freedom and for knowledge, and that makes you more curious. The reality of Albania made people more thirsty for knowledge than they are in the west. There is a single-mindedness of wanting to find the answer and not being impressed by the dominant philosophy of the time.
In one way, the multiverse is the most natural extension of the Copernican principle
Where did the universe come from and what was there before it existed were some of the most fascinating questions that I had been dreaming about. If I were to work in a lab, I would probably accidentally set it on fire.
It was a good time to get into the field of cosmology. For the first time in my life, we were able to ask the big questions that fascinated me as a child. There were a couple of major findings that made that curious. Dark energy is the same type of energy that existed at the time of the big bang as it is today.
Theory in string theory was one of the ingredients. The string theory was designed to fulfill Einstein's dream of a single universe. There was a lot of potential energy that could start universes like ours.
You describe a eureka moment in the book. I was intrigued by Roger Penrose's estimate that there was almost no chance of our universe coming into being. I was trying to figure out if he did something wrong by analyzing his argument. We needed a paradigm shift from one universe to many because of our way of thinking. The calculation was done using the landscape of string theory. I think I need a pool of many possible infant universes from which to choose, but how can I find out which one is ours? I realized that quantum mechanics is a part of string theory. Think of the universe as a wave and then quantum equations will tell me what happens to it.
There was a lot of hard work done. After your first calculation, you were stumped. The solution to that equation is not just one branch or one universe, it's a whole family. These branches areentangled with each other As they grow into classical universes, they need to separate from each other. In physics, this is known as decoherence, or washing out any trace of quantumentanglement that isn't related to classical physics. I didn't take this into consideration.
When the process of separation of universes occurs, how did you test your calculation? All the inflation fluctuations will leave scars or dents on our universe's CMB. We were able to calculate that. The strength of theentanglement between the branches was calculated. I was able to find out how much damage would be done to our sky as a result of inflation, and then make predictions on how those very large-scale anomalies would look in the future. One of the main predictions of inflation is that the sky is uniformly covered. The scarring from the other universes is violating the uniformity of the other universes. The predictions were made and they were seen by the satellite.
Yes, that must have been an amazing moment of validation. People began paying more attention to this work. To see beyond the horizon of our universe, we would have to break the light's speed, which we can't do. If we can't test the multiverse, then we shouldn't research it. You can find all the traces inside your sky if you get out of this universe. Everybody was doing research on the multiverse at that time.
Yes, absolutely, and would you say it's mainstream now? It is being worked on by all the great minds. Roger Penrose has a theories. In the last few years of Stephen's life, he began to work on the multiverse. Everybody has a version of the multiverse.
The multiverse is not easy to understand. I think about the other universes a lot. It is an extension of the Copernican principle, because once we thought the Earth was the center of the universe, and then the solar system and our galaxy, and now we are finding that even our universe is just one tiny grain of dust. That's much more logical to me.
Is it possible that other universes have life? I wanted to find out if structures would form in universes that were very different from ours. We found that you can changeNewton's constant by 10,000 and still get life in other universes. Our universe seems to be in a good state of health. We were sitting at the edge of two different types of housing.
Do you like writing? It wasn't satisfying to go back through your work step by step. More and more personal stories were shared. My colleagues have no idea about my life. That feels weird.
I haven't been to Albania in a while because my family moved to Toronto and I have no one left there. I will let you know what's going on. We were going to organize a conference in Albania. He died a month before the event was supposed to happen, but he was excited about it. I remember his head nurse telling me not to tell him we had canceled the conference because he was so excited. I didn't tell him.
The Bodley Head published before the big bang by Laura Mersini-Houghton Go to guardianbookshop.com to order your copy. Delivery charges can be applied.
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