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
But if you keep going to larger scales, things start simplifying again.
I mean, the planet is pretty simple.
the earth the sun you go to the larger scale you go to things get simpler and simpler we see black holes which are very big but they're extremely simple black hole just as a mass angular momentum charge you know it's like an elementary particle and you get to the whole universe again it's astonishingly simple on large scales so um
What I think of our job as physicists is to understand the simple things, the very small, the very large, and those seem to be incredibly well modeled by very precise mathematical formulae.
That doesn't explain everything at all.
It only explains the extremes.
Then we have to somehow understand how this interaction between the very large and the very small ends up producing complexity, and life, and consciousness, and all these wonderful things which physics is not ready to address yet because just too difficult.
I don't think there's a reason.
Well, I would say the following.
I was very privileged to know and work with Stephen Hawking, who was probably the most profound thinker about gravity.
Within a large group of very profound thinkers, Hawking was building on DeWitt and John Wheeler.
The field of gravity and quantum gravity, attempts to do quantum gravity, did attract some pretty amazing people, and Hawking was one of them.
Hawking introduced this concept of gravitational entropy.
Now, entropy is a very profound principle in physics, which explains macroscopic properties.
So take air in a room.
Why is it smoothly distributed in the room?
That maximizes the entropy.
That's just a typical state.
And so Hawking did the same.
Hawking realized how to define entropy for a spacetime and gravity.
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