It's difficult to describe the state of the universe's affairs when everything was compressed to a size slightly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Laura Mersini-Houghton is still looking for knowledge at the edge of the universe. Mersini-Houghton recounts her early life in communist Albania, her career as she rose to prominence in the male-dominated field of astrophysics, and her research into the multiverse which could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of reality.
Laura Mersini-Houghton wrote before the big bang: the origin of the universe and what lies beyond. The book was published by Mariner books. Laura Mersini-Houghton is the author All rights belong to the person.
Scientific investigations of problems like the creation of the universe, which we can't observe or reproduce in a lab, are similar to detective work in that they rely on intuition and evidence. Researchers can sense the answer is close as pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I felt like Rich and I were trying to figure out how to test our theory about the multiverse. It seemed like a longshot, but it was doable.
A possible solution hit me. The key to testing and validation was hidden in quantumentanglement. Our wave-universe was entangled with others and I was able to retrace the creation story back to its quantum-landscape roots.
The separation of the branches of the wave function of the universe was triggered by their interaction with the environmental bath of fluctuations. I wondered if we could find any trace of this early entanglement on our sky.
This could be a contradiction. Our universe is entwined with all the other universes, how could that be? We must have separated from them in their infancy. As I wrestled with these issues, I realized that it was possible to have a universe that had been dead for a long time but still had some of its old quirks. It should be possible to see the scars of its initial entanglement today.
Timing was the key. The wave-universe was going through its own inflation as the particle universe was coming into being. Everything we see in the sky today was created from the primordial fluctuations that took place in those first moments. As entanglement was being wiped out, its signatures could have been stamped on the inflatons. It was possible that the scars that I was imagining had formed during this brief period. If they had, they should be seen in the sky.
It's less complicated to understand how scars form fromentanglement. I wanted to create a mental picture of the scars on the sky. Our universe was visualized as a bunch of particles spread around the quantum multiverse. Because they all contain mass and energy, they interact with each other in a way similar to how an apple moves. The Earth has the strongest force, but that doesn't mean other forces don't exist Our universe is pulled on by other infant universes in order to capture the net effect on our sky. The signs of entanglement in our universe are very small compared to the signs of inflation. The people are still there.
I'm going to admit it. I was excited by the thought that I might be able to see beyond our horizon before the big bang. For the first time, I may have pinned down a way of testing the multiverse through my proposal of calculating and trackingentanglement in our sky. For centuries, we thought it was impossible to see space and time beyond our universe into the multiverse. Our expanding universe gives us the best place to look for information about the early days of our universe. The basic elements of our universe don't disappear over time, they just rescale their size as the universe expands.
The principle of "unitarity", which states that no information about a system can ever be lost, is one of the principles of quantum theory. There is a law called unitarity. It means that there are still signs of the earlier quantumentanglement of our universe. entanglement can never be erased from our universe's memory because it is in its original DNA. The signs have been in the sky since the beginning of the universe. As the universe became a much larger version of its infant self, there would be traces of this earlier entangledness.
I was worried that the signatures would be weak because they have been stretched by inflation. I believed that even though they were weak, they were still preserved in the sky in the form of local violations or deviations from homogeneity.
We decided to calculate the effect of quantumentanglement on our universe to find out if any traces were left behind, then fast- forward them from infancy to the present and make predictions for what kind of scars we should be looking for. We could test them by comparing them with actual observations.
Rich and I worked with a physicist in Tokyo. I met Tomo at UNC Chapel Hill when we were both at the school. I arrived at UNC just as he was about to leave for Japan. Tomo kept high standards for his work and his attention to detail. He was familiar with the computer simulation program that we needed to compare the predictions based on our theory with the actual data. Tomo agreed to work with us.
The best place to begin our search was in the Cosmic Microwave Background, also known as the afterglow from the Bigbang. The oldest light in the universe is called CMB and it's a universal "ether". It has an exclusive record of the first millionth of a second in the universe. The silent witness of creation is still alive and well.
The photons in your kitchen microwave are similar to the ones in the present universe because of their low energy. Three major international scientific experiments, dating from the 1990s to the present, have measured the CMB and its weak fluctuations to exquisite precision. Here on Earth, we even see the same type of photon. The experience of seeing and hearing the CMB signal used to be an everyday one in the era of old TV sets.
If our universe started from nothing but energy, what can we see in the images of the universe we see today? The answer is provided by quantum theory. The uncertainty principle says that quantum uncertainty is unavoidable. Waves of quantum fluctuations fill the universe when it stops inflating. Density perturbations are the range of fluctuations with mass and without. Waves that fit inside the universe become particles based on their mass.
Information on what model of inflation took place can be found in the tiny tremors in the fabric of the universe. They are very small, at one part of the strength of the spectrum, and therefore hard to observe. They are still there.
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