Wave Mathematics
Laura Mersini-Houghton
Horizon – Before the Big Bang
Dr Laura Mersini-Houghton
It is the holy grail of science to turn theory into fact with concrete observations, and for their pre-big bang ideas, the evidence is proving
frustratingly elusive. But there is a scientist who believes that her idea has actually been backed up by not one, but three observations already.
Laura Mersini-Houghton’s radical theory materialised, quite suddenly, in 2006.
Laura Mersini-Houghton “I was teaching early at 8 AM in the morning. And it was one of those large classes with about 100 students. I’m not an
early riser, so I wasn’t happy about it. However, I did manage to come and teach, and was done by 9 AM. So I thought, I deserve a coffee. Time for
a coffee to wake up and plan the rest of the day. Of course I’d been thinking about the big questions of cosmology. Why did we start with this big
bang and what was there before? And suddenly this idea comes.”
It was an idea that emerged from the fact that it’s possible to represent the entire universe not as an object, but mathematically, as a wave.
Dr Mersini Houghton’s idea was to manipulate the mechanics of that waveform with the branch of mathematics called string theory. It seemed to provide
an elegant solution as to why our universe emerged in the first place.
Laura Mersini-Houghton “When you do that, and you calculate how that waveform evolves, you do end up with the high energy big bang. It seemed
such a simple idea that in one hand I was very excited about it, at the simplicity of the idea, and the fact that it gave a very coherent picture
of connecting different branches of physics. But immediately after I was also thinking, it’s too simple.”
On the face of it, the theory looks much like the others. This it predicts a multiverse, and at least one big bang. But he stands out in
one crucial respect. It doesn’t commit the scientific sin of assuming initial conditions. It doesn’t assume an earlier collapsing universe. He
doesn’t assume pre-existing inflation. And it doesn’t assume a primordial black hole.
According to Mersini-Houghton, it assumes nothing at all.
Laura Mersini-Houghton “As far as I know it’s one of the few theories that everything is derived from first principles and fundamental physics.
Nothing has been tweaked by hand or can be changed. Even if I wanted to change a parameter, the equations would not allow me to do that.”
The other remarkable thing about the theory is that it fits with three observations, phenomena which have defied conventional explanation. There is
an unexplained patch of nothing, the so-called void in the cosmic microwave background. And great swathes of galaxies have been found to be moving in
the wrong direction. Another finding shows that there is something odd about the temperature in outer space. According to Mersini-Houghton, all these
effects are due to the presence of neighbouring universes, and are explained in precise detail by her theory.
Laura Mersini-Houghton “I really started taking the theory seriously only when the predictions that we derived were successfully tested. Three
unexplained, difficult to accommodate findings, observational findings, seem to just fall beautifully together in this theory and hang together.
And it’s a theory that would not only explain the high energy big bang, but have a continuation. A pre-big bang and after the big bang part
of the story.”
“So now you do know what happened before the big bang?”
Laura Mersini-Houghton “I think so. Yeah, I’m starting to believe it.”
