Neil Turok

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2,693 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 22 Jun

Neil Turok’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Neil Turok: A Route to Quantum Gravity (Without Strings) · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

So quadratic gravity has a bunch of different types of excitations.

It has a graviton-like excitation, which has spin 2.

It has a vector excitation, more like a Maxwell vector.

It has a spin 2 ghost, a guy that creates negative norm states.

Those are all coming from the vial curvature term.

The Ricci curvature is telling you about the scalar mode, which is the local scale of the metric, okay?

So by going to the four derivative theory, you have more degrees of freedom than you had in Einstein's gravity.

You've got all these ones I described, the graviton, the ghost graviton, the vector mode,

and the scalar mode.

And

What we've been able to do so far is study a limit of the theory in which the tensor-like modes, the gravitons and the vectors, decouple, and they become trivial.

So all we study is the scalar mode.

And that scalar mode, we're claiming, is a sensible quantum theory.

So if you like, it's a special limit of quantum gravity, doesn't have gravitons, won't have gravitational waves,

Okay, so it's not the real world.

It's not the right theory of gravity.

But it's a limit of something which might be the right theory of gravity.

Yes.

Okay, so it is very similar to QCD.

Now, QCD is, as we believe, a complete quantum field theory.

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