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
- 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?)
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 wrong question, different explanation