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
• 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

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