Before the Big Bang
Play sample
  • Published: 13 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784709341
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $30.00

Before the Big Bang

The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse

Formats & editions
Paperback
13 Feb 2024
Tr. Paperback
2 Aug 2022
Hardback
21 Aug 2022
EBook
21 Jul 2022
Audiobook
21 Jul 2022
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond
Find local retailers

One of the world's most celebrated cosmologists reveals our origins in the multiverse

One of the world's most celebrated cosmologists presents her breakthrough explanation of our origins in the multiverse.

In recent years, Laura Mersini-Houghton's ground-breaking theory, spectacularly vindicated with observational evidence, has turned the multiverse from philosophical speculation to one of the most compelling and credible explanations of our universe's origins.

In Before the Big Bang, she interweaves the story of how she arrived at this theory with her journey from communist Albania, where she was born and brought up, to the West, showing how her unconventional path helped her to challenge orthodoxies and become one of the most courageous thinkers on the world stage of theoretical physics.
  • Published: 13 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784709341
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Laura Mersini-Houghton

Prof. Laura Mersini-Houghton is an internationally renowned Cosmologist and Theoretical Physicist leading cutting-edge research in the physics of the universe at extreme energies and the nature of space time, based at the University of North Carolina (UNC). She was born in Albania when it was still under a communist dictatorship. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and is now a regular visiting professor at several universities around the world, including the University of Cambridge.

Prof. Mersini-Houghton has delivered over 200 speaking engagements for both the public and scientific communities on four continents. Her theory of the origins of the universe has attracted international media attention and has been tested by recent observational discoveries, with recognized success.

Praise for Before the Big Bang

What if our universe, vast though it may be, is but an infinitesimal fragment of reality? What would this 'multiverse' be like? And how could we possibly test the idea? There is no better guide to the bizarre, and sometimes paradoxical, cosmic super-realm than Laura Mersini-Houghton

PAUL DAVIES, author of What’s Eating the Universe?

A fascinating account

SIR ROGER PENROSE, Nobel laureate

From one of the world's most renowned cosmologists, Before the Big Bang offers insights into the Big Bang and, beyond it, into the majestic world of a quantum multiverse

STEPHON ALEXANDER, author of Fear of a Black Universe

A fascinating and unusual hybrid of pop science and memoir... The author's explanation of such exotic ideas is vivid and good-humoured, and much enlivened by tableaux from her education in Albania

Stephen Poole, Daily Telegraph, 5*

The age-old cosmological question of how and why the Big Bang happened has never been tackled with such aplomb

Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*