Laura
Mersini-Houghton is perhaps one of the most interesting and unlikely
transformative forces of nature in cosmology today. Born the daughter of a
professor of mathematics in Tiranë, Albania during Enver Hoxha’s quasi-Maoist
dictatorship - not a known fertile ground for astrophysicists - she teaches today
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not at Princeton, Caltech,
or Harvard. And yet, she seized Archimedes’ proverbial lever and took a stand
where the evidence led her. This may have moved the world of theoretical
physics by blowing up most of her colleagues’ assumptions about black holes with
a quantum effect that may reverberate for a long time across her discipline’s standard
narrative of how our universe began, and about some of its most intractable
phenomena known as black holes. As we had all long heard, the universe came
into being with a Big Bang - allegedly. But then Mersini-Houghton does not believe
in “the universe.” Her signature line of argument, within the landscape of string
theory,[1]
has long been for the existence of a multitude of universes as wave functions -
a “multiverse.” In that aspect of string theory, for which at least some hard evidence
appears to exist,[2] our
universe is merely one of 100500 possible ones,[3]
as Hugh Everett, III had first proposed in his 1957 many-worlds interpretation
of quantum physics.[4] She
claims that, as a logical result, standard Big Bang cosmology has been plain
wrong. And, no, Mersini-Houghton is assuredly not a scientific undercover agent
of creationism, either. In fact, she professes: “I am still not over the
shock.”[5]
