Before the Big Bang

Beyond the Big Bang presents a new cutting-edge theory from a pioneering scientist about the origins of our universe. Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton takes the reader through a brief history of ideas about the universe from ancient Greece to the latest frontiers of theory and observation, in which the author has been a leading participant, to bring us to her theory that our universe is not just one isolated phenomenon, but one of many, part of what she calls "the multiverse". Blending the personal with the theoretical, the book will explain in layman's terms Mersini-Houghton's theory of the origin of our universe and how she came to it. If Mersini-Houghton is proved to be right, the Big Bang theory will be just one other discredited theory and her new theories about the multiverse will represent a paradigm shift as significant as the Copernican Revolution that upended the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having the Earth as the centre of the universe. Beyond the Big Bang completes the story of the before and after the Big Bang by addressing key questions about the origin of the universe and what was there before.