Speaker
Laura Mersini-Houghton
(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
Description
In trying to understand the selection of the initial state of the universe, physics is experiencing a paradigm shift on the last decade. A multiverse extension of the standard model of cosmology is now a promising and active direction of research. I will provide a brief introduction of various efforts in extending cosmic inflation to a multiverse origin. I will then describe in some detail how we can derive, instead of postulating, the selection of the initial state of the universe in the context of my theory of the quantum multiverse; and, how, information about the origin of our universe can be revealed and tested with current astrophysical data.
