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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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So we decided to do that.

Having decided to do that, all sorts of things started to fall into place.

We could explain the dark matter in a simpler way than anyone else.

We could explain why the universe is smooth and spatially flat and the horizon puzzle.

All these things dropped out without requiring all the bells and whistles that previous people had assumed.

The one thing that didn't drop out was the fluctuations.

So we look at the sky.

The, the plasma, hot plasma of the hot big bang, which surrounds us and we measure its temperature.

And we see these fluctuations in the temperature and they're very important because they gave rise to galaxies and you know, they're our ancestors.

So now we can see those things.

What caused those fluctuations?

So in the inflation models, they are caused by quantum fluctuations on microscopic scales, which get exponentially stretched to large scales.

In our case, we don't have inflation, so we can't stretch these things.

So how else could you get them?

So the point of view we took is, look, let's just take it at face value.

Imagine they look like the vacuum fluctuations in a quantum field.

They have the statistical properties called Gaussian random noise.

But they have a spectrum, which meaning the strength of the fluctuations as a function of scale, a wavelength.

Their spectrum doesn't look like a normal scalar field.

It's more red.

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