In 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.

There is no shortage of books exploring this subject, and this is a solid addition to the literature...As the author explains, roughly 14 billion years ago, everything slammed together, and the universe went through an accelerated expansion...While there is evidence (the cosmic microwave background radiation) for such an explosion in the distant past, problems remain...Our cosmos is surprisingly homogenous...Around 1980, physicists proposed the idea of cosmic inflation, a spectacular expansion an instant after the Big Bang...By the 2000s, string theory offered tantalizing solutions that were also replete with difficulties and complications...Intrigued, the author considered the matter and found a solution that combines quantum theory with gravitational theory (both long accepted) and string theory (still under debate), producing a testable concept that required innumerable worlds: a multiverse...Mersini-Houghton’s long explanation of her concept will be heavy going for those unfamiliar with physics, and she does not deny that it remains controversial, but the possibilities suggested by her research are undeniably intriguing...A well-informed cosmology lesson for dedicated readers.

Cosmologist Mersini-Houghton melds memoir and scientific discovery in this mixed bag of a survey...Growing up in Albania when the country was under a totalitarian government, Mersini-Houghton developed a love of space, as 'the only place that was open to us was the... stars above. The state could not prevent us from looking up'...She eventually left the country after winning a scholarship to the University of Maryland...Alongside the stirring personal narrative, the author lays out her theory of the universe, which, she writes, changes 'how we conceive of our world and our place in it'...This one’s worth it for the hard-won personal success story, but the theory end of things doesn’t quite land.