Before the Big Bang

What exists outside our universe? What was there before the Big Bang? We can only guess!

However, today, new technological tools allow us to look beyond the horizon of our universe and test our theories about the limits of spacetime. What we find overturns what we knew about the Universe and our place in it.

Laura is familiar with both the limits and transcending them. As a child growing up in communist Albania, she discovered a universe beyond her isolated world through mathematics, physics, and music. As a female cosmologist in a male-dominated field, she broke the boundaries set by society and her profession. And as a pioneering researcher, she has given new dimension to the study of our universe by emphasizing that we do not live in a “Cosmic Albania” where the Universe ends at its borders, but that we are part of a vast family of universes – a multiverse – full of wonders that we are just beginning to unlock.

Her bold theory suggests that we "inhabit" a quantum landscape whose peaks and valleys hide a multitude of other universes and, indeed, that we are already "groping" the quantum secret of their origins. Recently, modern space instruments detected the "signatures" of such sibling universes in the night sky, bringing Mersini-Houghton closer to confirmation. Groundbreaking evidence for the vast Cosmic family of our universe comes to shake established perceptions.

Laura was well aware of the consequences of being bold. The girl who watched her friends climb the walls of the embassies in Tirana to escape and seek asylum abroad was determined to fight. Enduring oppression, censorship, and prison under the communist regime of "dear leader Enver" Hoxha, she studied physics and, after the fall of real socialism, left on a scholarship to a university in America, starting a brilliant career in the international scientific arena.

A short book, easy to read, human, and incredibly interesting. It has a strong personal tone, immediacy, absolute scientific validity in its most recent expression, but above all, it exudes an irresistible freshness.

Amazing success! There is no better way for a book to enter a heart that is a "blank slate" for deep physics but which thrills in awe in front of the vastness of the Universe.