Secrets of the Universe: Neil Turok Public Lecture

How did the universe begin? How did it evolve to what we see now?

In his Perimeter Public Lecture webcast on October 25, 2023, Perimeter Director Emeritus Neil Turok shared his insights into the basic laws of the universe and their surprising simplicity – including his latest work on an alternative to the cosmological inflation model.

Turok is an internationally renowned cosmologist who has collaborated with luminaries such as the late Stephen Hawking. He is the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, and holds the Carlo Fidani Roger Penrose Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter.

[justaguy]

I spend too much emotional capital listening to the problems of our political landscape. I come to these videos of lectures given by rational, intelligent, intellectually curious people to remind myself that they, and I hope I can say we, still exist. I hope there are enough of us engaged enough to turn the tide of the irrational mobs that will, if they can manage to do so, overrun virtually every intellectual pursuit left to humanity.

[mikaelbiilmann]

Love these videos. A lot I still don't understand, but whenever a little piece falls into place, I am so happy.

[timveseli]

Unbelievable that you can listen to some of the greatest minds in our time. Turok is brilliant.

[draxiedru]

Besides his obvious profound intelligence and curiosity I find Prof Turok to be equally humble and human. So many of the world’s other notable theorists are just so inaccessible and seem insulted when their theories are challenged.

[philiprice]

Whether or not Turok is on to something this was a masterclass in presentation and exposition. The students at Edinburgh are so lucky!

[itzybitzyspyder]

I wish I could have caught this live. I'm just a lowly butcher, but science is my first and truest love.

[danielpaulson]

Mind blown. Thank you for making this available for us. What a wonderful opportunity to have access to the worlds greatest thinkers and researchers.
Somehow I feel as if we step back far enough, we would see our life emergent from the flotsam of increasingly complex energy waves. Life is freaking amazing.

[ShannonSp-wnqk]

Thank you for having me I enjoy being here with all of y'all today and I believe it will be the Big show for everyone very soon we will see what life can really be

[johnsiman]

Turok: “It tells us its secrets.” Recall Shakespeare’s lines: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

[Barnaclebeard]

This tab has been sitting in by browser for 4 months, I'm glad I finally watched it. I cannot tell you how relieved I am to learn that Turok finally has cosmology under control.

[semmering]

I trully love such smart and clever people - thank you for bringing this excellent talk in Youtube to us.

[msm]

This is what we all being waiting for since The Astonishing Simplicity!

[evoov]

"It would be called Enlightenment." Nice! Distinctly fitting summarization & clear conjunction to the acutely mind-blowing cliffhanger of a lecture. Mr. Turok gave with the Simplicity of Everything at PI in 2015 as Director.

[Psychx_]

Finally another public lecture. I've been missing those a lot! And then it's even with Neil the legend Turok himself :D

[whtfsh]

As always Neil Turok provided a very informative talk. My only criticism is that the shots of the audience during the talk were rather distracting.

[aclearlight]

A truly wonderful exposition. So profound yet also very accessible. It takes a true master to make it look this easy. 🖖🌠🌈🛸🦄

[Stadtpark]

4:53 talk starts here

Edit: Could have needed bookmarks to jump to the new stuff (edit: note to self: jump to 41:26 ; the real bomb gets dropped 57:56). Pretty slow start; even a bit tedious to watch the beginning.

19:30 our model of the universe: Lambda CDM
22:02 promises minimal theory: starts talking about critical behavior and phase transitions; (foreshadowing)
28:09 promises easy solution to the Big Bang; (more foreshadowing)
34:00 smallest and biggest lengths you could even theoretically ever see: introducing Planck Length and Lambda Horizon; (at Planck Length a photon of that wavelength would form a Black Hole, so light can not escape; at Lambda Horizon distance, space expands faster than c, so that this light can never reach us)
38:13 “These are all the laws we know.” - reiterating that maybe there are no more “new particles” (- even more foreshadowing)
39:27 The Standard Model (insert usual picture)
40:31 Three Generations of Particles, but why? (- more foreshadowing)


About time we came to the good stuff (- the things I hadn’t heard before)

41:26 right handed Neutrinos (Seesaw mechanism) as good candidate for Dark Matter
43:18 predicting the cosmic abundance of right handed neutrinos via CPT-symmetry; the Big Bang as a mirror
46:29 so: what if right handed Neutrinos are Dark Matter? A stable and heavy right handed Neutrino would imply the lightest normal, left handed Neutrino to be massless! There are measurements underway to constrain the mass of the Neutrino.
48:32 nice side effect: Penrose gets his “conformal Big Bang”

51:47 claim / argument for why the cosmos is as it is: entropic reasoning

57:56 “NO ADDITIONAL SMOOTHING OR FLATTENING MECHANISM IS REQUIRED.”

Turok pulling a UNO Reverse on the Inflationists. A true Laplace-vs-Napoleon-move: ”I had no need for this hypothesis, Sire.” 😂 Mic-Drop-Moment

59:01 the problem of

1:00:38 The origin of the three generations and structure formation: introducing 36 zero-dimensional-fields to get rid of infinite vacuum energy

On second viewing: this seems a little light on the details…

P.S.: You plug in a measurement from Particle Physics / The LHC into your formula and receive a value that equals a measurement from Cosmology / The Planck CMB satellite to almost two decimal points. - How does that tell me anything about how you chose your formula? Maybe you chose it in a way that it fits? You introduced 36 new constants of nature for this?? How is that progress? How is this the end of the talk?? This should be the beginning of a talk! Does this count as an explanation? - You could have produced a rabbit from a hat like that, for all I know! Are you sure you didn’t just put in the rabbit in the first place? Forget all the hand movements and the name dropping: what exactly did you do? I just have to admit that I did not understand a thing.

[dm]

A privilege to sit in on this lecture from home. Thank you.

[gregkeet]

I love this conversation. I would love to understand how long cycle gravitational waves can be explained within this theory. In my perception. I always figured it never become as a singularity and that the wavelength of light stretched over time, creating the red shifts and make galaxies appear to be travelling away when they weren't. It's been a long journey of trying to figure it all out.

[Cat_Woods]

I get that it seems simple to Neil, but honestly, even the stuff I thought I understood ok, when he explains it, I realize, wow, I REALLY don't understand this. No shade. I just think he understands these things at a level I'm nowhere near.
(...going to replay it a bunch more times to see if I can get it a bit more)