Diff for "BeforeTheBigBang"

Before The Big Bang

Laura Mersini-Houghton 2022

523.1 MER Beaverton Library

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mersini-Houghton

Cosmology can be strange, Communist Albania was stranger. This book takes a strange path through both, but arrives at worthwhile insights. The book mixmasters time sequences like many modern books, I will try to unmix it here.

Biography

• xi Albania 3M people, before 1991 the "North Korea" of Europe
• xii mother's workplace had English books
• xiii economist father Nexhat Mersini (no citations or biography found) new algorithm for inverting very big sparse matrices
• 03-4 math or physics? did both

• 17 1991 Feb university student hunger strike, 100s of miners walked 50 miles to Tirana, overthrow government

• 19 170K-300K left via foreign embassies, almost all students
• 01 1991 Oct US Embassy opened, Cultural Center
• 35 Professor Bardulla, different solution to exam
• 01 1994 bachelor's degree physics, grad school elsewhere
• 01 1994 Jan, Tirana's Mother Teresa Airport to Fulbright Scholarship U Maryland, arrival paralyzing blizzard
• 05 200 physics grad students, 3 women

• 07 large bookstore in Bethesda ( Second Story Books?)

• 21 Masters degree at UMD, 1997-2000 UW-Milwaukee for PhD, Leonard Parker

• 50 1992 Met economist Jeff Houghton in Albania
• 51 1993 Dec meets LM at Zurich, flies to US with her
• 38 1994 Jan, UNC Chapel Hill
• 61 2000 Doctorate UW-Milwaukee, focus on cosmology
• 81 father exiled, attempted divorce to protect family, denied
• 95 Albania required subjects, history of Marxism, and PE, LM failed exam on former, physics professors forced a pass
• 114 30% of PhD graduates get academic jobs, fewer get tenure, conventional subjects recommended by mentors
• 116 walked to and from campus, 118 coffee shops
• 120 went outside for a cigarette (started during Tirana student embassy escape, quit quite recently)
• 131

Philosophy of Science

• xix childlike curiosity endures, neoteny
• xx benefits/justification, Faraday's "you will tax it someday"

Cosmology

• xvii we are part of a multiverse, with cross-talk to other universise due to quantum entanglement, predicting observables

• 06 Penrose: universe likelihood less than 10^(-101e123)

• 07 Hawking and Penrose singularity theorem 8-14 argument from entropy, big bang VERY ordered?

• 15 foreshadow wrong question, different explanation

• 25 1922 Alexander Friedmann expanding universe

• 26 Gamow hot big bang / 27 Helium-sized initial universe too big for uniformity

• 29 Universe not closed or open, geometrically flat

• 30 Alan Guth Andrei Linde

• 31 inflation inflaton 1e-45 seconds, 1e20 size increase

• 33 author believes cosmic inflation theory incomplete

• 62 standard model, universe expands to blueberry size, particle wavelength increases, energy decays into light and other particles, reheating (misnomer)

• 63 Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, helium and other elements, 4 minutes

• 63 380KY, photons decouple into Cosmic microwave background CMB

• 65 Primordial gravitational waves

• 65 goal, derive unique model of cosmic inflation,
• 66 without exquisite balancing (10 ppm density variations)
• 67 entropy state nearly zero, ominously small
• 68 LM-H instead believed cosmic inflation model correct but incomplete

• 69 Dark energy

• 75 calculated high entropy "big crunch" rather than low entropy singularity, didn't work
• 77 single universe assumption to blame, why not discard it?
• 82 multiple infant universes? p83 Niels Bohr adamant that a single universe had to be identified
• 85 Bohr model double standard, treated observer as classical object, mixed determinism with quantum indeterminism

• 89-90 Hugh Everett III Many-worlds interpretation

• 92 Everett could not reconcile with Bohr, argument refereed by Charles W. Misner who later taught Mersinni at UMD

• 93 Everett finally published as many worlds interpretation by UNC Bryce DeWitt The many worlds of Hugh Everett III Peter Byrne

  The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics : a fundamental exposition

• 98 All forces unify at 1e-4 || of big bang energy

  • Huh? Theory of everything says 1e28 eV, about a GJ

• 99 String theory

• 102 Edward Witten 11 dimensions 1995

• 106 Compactification

• 108 1e600 possibilities

• 109 Multiverse

• 114 String theory landscape

• 117 the space of initial states for the universe 119 quantum mechanics on the landscape of string theory
• 121 it would allow me to derive the probability of the origin of our universe (and evade the Penrose problem)
• 130 incorrect analogy/model of electrons flowing in wire, suggests pure perfect crystal metal is lossless

• 131 Quantum formalism, waves in abstract spaces

• 131 Wheeler–DeWitt equation

• 132 six month crash course in condensed matter physics, similar structures in string landscape

• 133 Random matrix theory, nonuiform landscape

• 133 Collaborator Archil Kobakhidze

• 134 beam of tiny quantum universes get trapped in energy valleys
• 136 high energy universe like ours, lowest probability

• 137 Quantum decoherence, most probable universes started at very high energy.1

• 139 Unlike Everett many worlds, unequal chances for existence of universes

• 145 Rich Holman Carnegie Mellon emeritus

• 146 branches of the wave function decohere, take energy from the landscape vacua, then undergo big bang inflation, decoupled from others.

• 147 early entanglement -> "crosstalk" among branches, perhaps imprinted on our sky today

• 148 high energy infant universes most likely
• 149 Everett assumed multiple equal energy universes, high energy more probable and "fit"
• 150 the gravitational field of energy (unlike matter) has negative heat capacity, repulsive gravity (how so?)
• 150 high energy inflation have the highest chance of growth into macroscopic universes (how so?)
• 151 terminal universes removed

  • ref terminal universes

• 152 nothing special, nothing tuned, evolutionary selection
  • presumably what is special is that we are in a universe that survived long enough for us to happen, others did not
  • rechecked, published

  • perhaps this: Why did the universe start from a low entropy state?

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Elsewhere

• 2014 Black holes don't exist?

• 2017 Classical Collapse to Black Holes and Quantum Bounces: A Review Daniele Malafarina