Summary of Laura Mersini-Houghton's Before the Big Bang / IRB Media (ePub)

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I left Albania in 1994 for a new life in the United States. I had won a full scholarship to study at an American university. I was shocked when I received a letter congratulating me on winning a Fulbright scholarship to study advanced physics for one academic year at the University of Maryland in College Park.

#2 I had always wanted to be in the world of numbers and hard sciences, and I ended up majoring in physics and math at the University of Tirana. My friends in Albania thought that doing math for fun was nuts, but once I migrated to the United States, I found myself surrounded by students who were as passionate about the subject as I was.

#3 I was drawn to the big questions about the universe, and I especially liked theoretical physics and cosmology. I was accepted into the Gravitational Theory and Cosmology Group at the University of Maryland, and I learned that the odds that our universe would form in the way that it did were nearly zero.

#4 I was initially drawn to the singularity theorem because it seemed so strange. It stated that if our universe has been expanding since its creation, then it must have started from a point in space of infinite energy density, which is a singularity. I didn't believe it, and I continued to dissect and analyze Penrose's reasoning.