Laura Mersini-Houghton is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis and the author of a theory for the origin of the universe that holds that our universe is one of many selected by quantum gravitational dynamics of matter and energy. Predictions of her theory have been successfully tested by astrophysical data. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.
Biography
Laura Mersini was born in Tirana, Albania, as a daughter of the mathematician and eminent economist Nexhat Mersini. Mersini-Houghton received her B.S. degree from the University of Tirana, Albania. In 1994, Mersini-Houghton was a super Fulbright scholar at University of Maryland-College Park, MD for 8 months. In 1997, Mersini-Houghton was awarded her M.Sc. by the University of Maryland. In 2000, Mersini-Houghton completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. From 2000 to 2002, after earning her doctorate, Mersini-Houghton was a postdoctoral fellow at the Italian Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. From 2002 to 2003, Mersini-Houghton had a postdoctoral fellowship at Syracuse University. In January 2004, Mersini-Houghton accepted a position as assistant professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at University of North Carolina.In. 2004-2006 in a series of papers she presented the theory of the origin of the universe from the multiverse, and made a series of predictions, including The Giant Void, that is able to test the theory. She was granted tenure in 2008 and promotion to associate professor in 2009 and full professor later. On 11 October 2010, Mersini-Houghton appeared in a BBC programme entitled What Happened Before the Big Bang, where she propounded her theory of the universe as a wave function on the landscape multiverse. Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III. Her predictions were successfully tested recently by Planck satellite experiment. See also a discussion of her ideas in the context of the history and philosophical implications of the idea of a multiverse here. In September 2014, Mersini-Houghton claimed to demonstrate mathematically that, given certain assumptions about black hole firewalls, current theories of black hole formation are flawed. She claimed that Hawking radiation causes the star to shed mass at a rate such that it no longer has the density sufficient to create a black hole. She organized with Stephen Hawking an historic conference in 2015 in Stockholm to discuss these fundamental topics. Her paper on the subject was applauded by Cuban Revolutionary Fidel Castro in an article to Granma Newspaper.
Teaching
Mersini-Houghton teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Quantum Mechanics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
