Before the Big Bang
The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond
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4.4 • 18 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"A riveting tour of the cosmos from one of the brightest minds in astrophysics." —The Washington Post
A revolutionary new account of our universe’s creation—and a breathtaking exploration of the landscape from which we sprang—from one of the world’s most celebrated cosmologists
What came before the Big Bang, and what exists outside of the universe it created? Until recently, scientists could only guess at what lay past the edge of space-time. However, as pioneering theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton explains, new scientific tools are now giving us the ability to peer beyond the limits of our universe and to test our theories about what is there. And what we are finding is upending everything we thought we knew about the cosmos and our place in it.
Mersini-Houghton is no stranger to boundaries—or to pushing through them. As a child growing up in Communist Albania, she discovered a universe beyond her walled-off world through the study of math and science, and through music. As a female cosmologist in a male-dominated field, she transcended the limits that society and her profession tried to place on her. And as a trailblazing researcher, she helped to revolutionize the study of our universe by revealing that, far from living in a cosmic Albania, with a world that ends at its borders, we are part of a larger family of universes—a multiverse—that holds wonders we are only beginning to unlock. Mersini-Houghton’s groundbreaking research suggests that we sit in a quantum landscape whose peaks and valleys hide a multitude of other universes, and even hold the secret to the origins of existence itself. Recent evidence has revealed the signatures of such sibling universes in our own night sky, confirming Mersini-Houghton’s theoretical work and offering humbling evidence that our universe is just one member of an unending cosmic family.
The incredible scientific saga of one woman’s mind-expanding journey through the multiverse, Before the Big Bang will reshape our understanding of humanity’s place in the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cosmologist Mersini-Houghton melds memoir and scientific discovery in her mixed bag of a debut. 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." She's on shakier ground here: her "quantum landscape multiverse" theory, she posits, disproves the notion that there's just one universe and offers a look at what happened before the big bang. While she calls the theory a game changer, the science behind it is often imprecise or unclear ("I had missed a crucial piece of the puzzle: the separation or decoupling of the different entangled branches of the wave function of the universe"). This one's worth it for the hard-won personal success story, but the theory end of things doesn't quite land.
Customer Reviews
One of the best science books
The exposition is clear, the subject really fascinating, the personal interludes add immeasurably, the analogies are innovative. For example, I never understood why the very many six dimensional Calibi-Yao manifolds were compactified until the author's squashing of ten or so spatial dimension things into three dimensional things.
I highly recommend this book. It matches the best of Rovelli or Carroll.
The multiverse
This absolutely fascinating and well thought out exploration of the multiverse is by far the best I have read. The premise is difficult to dispute and can be proved by experiment, which makes it unusual for multiverse hypotheses. The author reflects charmingly on her youth in communist Albania and the intellectual impact of her father. It offers incredible insights in language that lay readers can understand.