Neil Turok
speaker
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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what I mean by real problem is what happened at the Big Bang.
What goes on in black holes?
Is there information loss?
These kind of questions have not been solved by these very complex frameworks for quantum gravity.
So what we've recently realized is that there's rather a simple-minded approach to quantum gravity, which actually has been around since the 1970s.
It was begun by somebody called Kelly Stell, who unfortunately passed away recently.
But he wrote a paper arguing that if you include terms in the gravitational action, so you generalize Einstein's action, Einstein's action involves the curvature of spacetime and also a length scale.
which is called a Planck mass or Planck length or Newton's constant.
It's all the same thing.
So there's a scale in Einstein's theory of gravity.
If you include terms in the action, which are the square of the curvature.
In addition to the regular?
In addition to the regular Einstein action and the cosmological constant, which has no derivatives.
Then you have Einstein's term, which has two derivatives because it's a curvature.
And then you can include curvature squared terms.
And that makes gravity much more like a gauge theory.
Because in a gauge theory, the action is an integral of the curvature, the field strength squared.
Maxwell's theory, QCD, they all work the same way.
So in gravity, you can put the curvature squared into the action.
And then there's almost a trivial argument that tells you that that theory, which includes Einstein, but also these four derivative terms, is renormalizable.
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