Лаура Мерсини-Хаутон: Космолог, көп әлем теориясының жақтасы

American cosmologist and theoretical physicist

Laura Mersini Houghton (née Mersini) 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. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.

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 Fulbright scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park for 8 months. In 1997, Mersini Houghton was awarded her M. Sc. by the University of Maryland. 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 the 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. With Stephen Hawking, she organized a historic conference in 2015 in Stockholm to discuss these fundamental topics.

Mersini Houghton teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Quantum Mechanics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.