A physicist in multiverse

A short but beautifully written book by an Albanian woman physicist delves into the non-mathematical explanations of the existence of multiple universes and where the hypothesis could lead

Before the Big Bang: The origin of our universe from the multiverse

Author: Laura Mersini Houghton

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 240

Price: Rs 699

Albanian-American cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton has never been afraid to make bold claims. Apart from holding contrarian views on the nature of black holes, she is one of several eminent physicists who believe in multiple universes and she pioneered in examining the possibility with mathematical rigour.

This book is structured around non-mathematical explanations of where a multiverse hypothesis comes from, and where it could lead. However, while Professor Mersini-Houghton has a gift for using striking analogies, this book is extraordinary for an entirely different reason.

She opens up about her personal life and the horrifying circumstances of growing up under the most repressive regime in Europe. She is the daughter of mathematician, Nexhat Mersini, who spent years in internal exile under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha and of his successor, Ramiz Alia.

The Mersini family had been landowners. Nexhat’s uncles were jailed for decades. His brother was not only executed; the body was used for anatomy lessons in a medical college, and returned to the family for interment only 40 years later.

Despite being one of Albania’s premier academics, Nexhat was sentenced to internal exile multiple times for arbitrary reasons. One punishment occurred because he received an unsolicited invitation from Oxford asking him to deliver a series of lectures. In order to shield his family from persecution by association, Nexhat begged his wife to divorce him on the spurious grounds of domestic violence. But when she stood up in court, the judge (a personal friend of Nexhat) scolded her and refused to grant a divorce.

Nexhat not only encouraged his children to study; he pointed out that curiosity about the sciences was one of the few things the regime could not punish. He and his wife found workarounds to evade censorship, reading Russian translations of West European classics, and inculcating the love of classical music in their children.

Ms Mersini-Houghton had an odd problem when she joined university: She had gold medals in both Maths and Physics Olympiads and couldn’t decide on her major. She literally tossed a coin. Physics came up. She was at the University of Tirana during 1991-92 when the dictatorship fell, amidst widespread protests.

Some 500,000 Albanians (the country has a population of 3 million) fled that year with many of her friends scaling the walls of embassies to seek asylum. The author and her family were in the crowd when Hoxha’s statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square (the India Gate equivalent in Tirana) and her brother gave her a few marble fragments of the statue as a keepsake.

She carried those chips with her to America when she received a Fulbright Scholarship. Travelling to DC via Zurich, she was surprised to be paged at Zurich airport. A young economist, Jeff Houghton was waiting for her at the Swissair desk. They had met when he was working on a World Bank project in Albania. He had flown down from London to join her on the Zurich –Washington leg. They spent the next several years in a commuting relationship, with Dr Houghton working mostly in Europe while Ms Mersini-Houghton moved between various institutions in the US and Italy as she worked through a PhD, did post-doctoral research and achieved tenure at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The author never lost her sense of humour. Even the horrors of Albania are described in wry tones with multiple hilarious incidents thrown in. She passed her mandatory college viva in communist “theology” after the maths and physics departments did a quid pro quo with the political scientists by agreeing to pass their favoured pol sci students in their science courses. She was fined $100 in Milwaukee when she bumped into a traffic policeman while crossing a road illegally as she absentmindedly reviewed her PhD thesis.

And so, onto science. The night sky was a refuge for Ms Mersini-Houghton and Nexhat in Communist Albania and that led to her early interest in cosmology. When she started looking at the Big Bang, she decided it was a correct but incomplete theory.

The concept of cosmic inflation with a very small, tightly packed universe explosively expanding some 13.8 billion years ago fits the available data well. But Roger Penrose’s calculations and back-extrapolations of the same data also indicate a vanishingly small chance our universe would have exactly the shape and universal physical constants that it does. If, however, it is one of many universes with the others possessing other characteristics, the existence of our universe would be less surprising.

The existence of other universes should show up in anomalous data. Professor Mersini-Houghton and her collaborators predicted seven such likely anomalies such as the presence of a giant void in the universe at a specific location, and strange signals in cosmic microwave background radiation caused by particle entanglement with other universes.

Six of those seven anomalies have since been discovered, with the Planck Telescope locating the void in 2013. Is this conclusive evidence? No. But the multiverse is no longer just a fanciful science fiction construct. Other scientists (including Dr Penrose) have espoused other versions of the multiverse theory and also suggested ways to look for more evidence.

In sum, this is a short but beautifully written book. The science is explained in small accessible bite-sized doses with colourful analogies, and the autobiographical details are just stunning.