PositiveWashington PostIn her book, Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond, quantum cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton focuses on the prequel to this galactic episode, pondering what happened beforehand that put our universe in the position to be banged open...There is no physical evidence for this era, so it’s a little like investigating a murder before the murder’s taken place...But this quandary is still possible to explore, at least in the field of theoretical physics...Students of physics and the broader sciences will be deeply fascinated by this riveting tour of the cosmos from one of the brightest minds in astrophysics...But for anyone who got an A-minus or lower in high school physics and longs for the Cliffs Notes version, here it is: Our universe is large, far larger than we can conceive of, and possibly part of a strangely behaved multiverse, and it all started from a point infinitesimally small that erupted in a bang indescribably big...Mersini-Houghton has the receipts to prove it, or at least to show how she arrived at her persuasive conclusions...She soberly admits that her multiverse theory isn’t for everyone...At one point she recalls when, during a debate with another astrophysicist, the two mostly agreed that only about half of their colleagues believe in the multiverse, and of those, there are a handful of different ideas about how it’s shaped and how it behaves.
