Join cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton as she discusses her ground-breaking theory, and how her path from communist Albania helped her become one of the most courageous thinkers on the world stage of theoretical physics. Watch the Q&A for this video here: https://youtu.be/6xpVP_ITEYE

Laura’s book “Before the Big Bang: The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse” is available to purchase now: https://geni.us/2TDDa
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The multiverse has gone from philosophical speculation to one of the most compelling and credible explanations of our universe’s origins.

In this talk, Laura interweaves her unconventional journey with reshaping our understanding of humanity’s places in the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos.

This lecture was filmed on 3 August 2022.

0:00 Introduction
3:15 The story of the universe in one slide
6:49 Why does entropy make the universe seemingly impossible?
11:49 The origin of the universe in philosophy
16:54 Is the universe deterministic
22:14 The quantum to classical transition
28:45 Developing the theory of the multiverse
33:32 A crisis in string theory
37:48 Using quantum cosmology
45:18 The cold spot theory and cosmic variants
48:10 The progress of cosmology
52:22 Dinner in a nuclear reactor

Laura Mersini-Houghton is an internationally renowned cosmologist and theoretical physicist and one of the world’s leading experts on the multiverse and the origins of the universe.

Born in Albania when it was still under a communist dictatorship, Laura was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to study in the United States and is now a regular visiting professor at several universities around the world, including the University of Cambridge. She has been the subject of hundreds of articles in leading popular science magazines and has appeared in documentaries on the Science Channel, Discovery Channel and the BBC.

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