In theoretical physics, quantum cosmology is a field attempting to study the effect of quantum mechanics on the formation of the universe, or its early evolution, especially just after the Big Bang. Despite many attempts, such as the Wheeler-deWitt equation, the field remains a rather speculative branch of quantum gravity.

An important problem in this field is the origin of physical information in the universe.

Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and belongs to the scientific directorate of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Tegmark was born as Max Shapiro in Sweden, son of Karin Tegmark and Harold S. Shapiro, studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and later received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After having worked at the University of Pennsylvania, he is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While still in high-school, Max wrote, and sold commercially, together with school buddy Magnus Bodin a word processor written in pure machine code for the Swedish 8-bit computer ABC80.

His research has focused on cosmology, combining theoretical work with new measurements to place constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters, often in collaboration with experimentalists. He has over 200 publications, of which 9 have been cited over 500 times. He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to Cosmic Microwave Background experiments such as COBE, QMAP, and WMAP, and to galaxy redshift surveys such as the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, the 2dF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

George V. Coyne, S.J. (born January 19, 1933) is a Jesuit priest, astronomer, and former director of the Vatican Observatory and head of the observatory’s research group which is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Since January 2012, he has served as McDevitt Chair of Religious Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY.

Professor Coyne completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his licentiate in philosophy at Fordham University, New York City, in 1958. He carried out a spectrophotometric study of the lunar surface for the completion of his doctorate in astronomy at Georgetown University in 1962. He spent the summer of 1963 doing research at Harvard University, the summer of 1964 as a National Science Foundation lecturer at the University of Scranton, and the summer of 1965 as visiting research professor at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (UA LPL).

A member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) since the age of 18, he completed a licentiate in sacred theology at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1965. Coyne was visiting assistant professor at the UA LPL in 1966-67 and 1968–69, and visiting astronomer at the Vatican Observatory in 1967-68.

Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde (Russian: Андрей Дмитриевич Линде; born March 2, 1948) is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and professor of Physics at Stanford University. Dr. Linde is best known for his work on the concept of the inflationary universe. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow State University. In 1975, Linde was awarded a Ph.D. from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. Among the various awards he's received for his work on inflation, in 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal, along with Alan Guth of MIT and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.

Linde is best known for proposing "eternal chaotic inflation" to explain a number of problems in cosmology. This variant of cosmic inflation proposes that the false vacuum is eternally inflating in exponential growth powered by repulsive constant random zero point dark energy of negative pressure. This false vacuum is like supersaturated steam in which liquid bubbles of more stable vacuum form with Higgs-Goldstone fields that describe the cohering of most of the pre-inflationary random dark energy into the smooth fabric of curved spacetime. Our universe is only a small causal part of a single bubble, and there are 10^10^10^7 bubbles. In fact, there are 10^10^10^7 of universes like ours on a single bubble which is more like an expanding infinite sheet than a finite spherical surface (suppressing 1 space dimension for ease of visualization).

Simon Saunders (born London, 30 August 1954) is a British philosopher of physics. He is noted for his work on quantum mechanics (particularly the many-worlds interpretation), on identity and indiscernibility in physics, and on structural realism.

Saunders is currently Professor of Philosophy of Physics at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Linacre College, having moved to Oxford in 1996. He has previously held permanent posts at Harvard University (1990-1996), and temporary or visiting positions at Wolfson College, Oxford (1985–89), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1989-1990), Harvard (2001), École Polytechnique (2004), University of British Columbia (2005), Perimeter Institute (2005), and IMERA (Institute Mediterranean de Recherche Avancees) (2010). He is married to Kalypso Nicolaïdis; they have two children.

Saunders was an early graduate of the Physics and Philosophy undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford. He then studied the part III Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge under Martin Rees, John Polkinghorne, and Peter Goddard, and wrote his PhD at King’s College, London under the supervision of Michael Redhead. The thesis title was ‘Mathematical and Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory’.