The cosmologist who claims to have evidence for the multiverse

Cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton says our beingness is 1 of galore – and she argues that we person already seen signs of those different universes successful the cosmic microwave background, the airy near implicit from the large bang

Physics 31 October 2022

By Rowan Hooper

Nabil Nezzar

HOW did our beingness begin? This is among the astir profound questions of all, and you would beryllium forgiven for reasoning it is intolerable to answer. But Laura Mersini-Houghton says she has cracked it. A cosmologist astatine the University of North Carolina astatine Chapel Hill, she was calved and raised nether communist dictatorship successful Albania, wherever her begetter was considered ideologically opposed to the authorities and exiled. She aboriginal won a Fulbright assistance to survey successful the US, forging a vocation successful cosmology successful which she has tackled the origins of the universe – and made an bonzer proposal.

Mersini-Houghton’s large thought is that the beingness successful its earliest moments tin beryllium understood arsenic a quantum wave function – a mathematical statement of a haze of possibilities – that gave emergence to galore divers universes arsenic good arsenic our own. She has besides made predictions astir however different universes would permission an imprint upon our own. Those ideas person been controversial, with immoderate physicists arguing that her predictions are invalid. But Mersini-Houghton argues that they person been confirmed by observations of the radiation near implicit from the large bang, known arsenic the cosmic microwave background.

Here, she tells New Scientist astir her ideas and her life, which she has described successful her caller publication Before the Big Bang: The origins of our beingness successful the multiverse.

Rowan Hooper: Let’s commencement with your ain communicative of growing up successful Albania. To what grade has that shaped your thinking?

Laura Mersini-Houghton: It’s contributed a lot. I was fortunate due to the fact that I had the benignant of parents who spotted aboriginal connected that I was funny successful …