Laura Mersini-Houghton

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Laura Mersini-Houghton
Born Tirana, Albania
Nationality Albanian American
Institutions University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alma mater Tirana University
University of Maryland
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Doctoral advisor Leonard Parker

Laura Mersini-Houghton (née Mersini) is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis which holds that our universe is one of many.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.[9][10]

Education

Mersini-Houghton received her B.S. degree from the University of Tirana, Albania, and her M.Sc. from the University of Maryland.[11] She was awarded a Ph.D. in 2000 by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. After earning her doctorate, Mersini-Houghton was a postdoctoral fellow at the Italian Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa from 2000 to 2002. In 2002 she had a postdoctoral fellowship for two years at Syracuse University.[11] She accepted a job as faculty at University of North Carolina, and in January 2004, she started as assistant professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at UNC and was granted tenure in 2008.[11]

TV

On October 11, 2010, Laura Mersini-Houghton appeared in a BBC programme What Happened Before the Big Bang (along with Michio Kaku, Neil Turok, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, and other physicists) where she propounded her theory of the universe as a wave function on the landscape multiverse.[12] Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III.[13] See also a discussion of her ideas in the context of the history and philosophical implications of the idea of a multiverse here.[14]

In September 2014, she claimed to demonstrate mathematically that, given certain assumptions about black hole firewalls, current theories of black hole formation are flawed.[15] 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.[11][16]

References

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  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 University of North Carolina, Department of Physics and Astronomy Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "UNC" defined multiple times with different content
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Further reading

  • Meet Laura Mersini-Houghton – An interview with Mersini-Houghton on North Carolina Public Radio
  • Laura Mersini-Houghton; Rudy Vaas (eds.) (2012) Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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