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
What you do is you put your molecules in a room.
You quantize them.
It's very important because that makes the states discrete.
And then you say, okay, what are the quantum states which are consistent with the macroscopic observables?
The total energy in the room, the total number of atoms.
That's a subset of the quantum states.
And then I just pick one at random.
Because it's discrete, it provides a measure.
There's a finite number of states and they're all equally likely, so just pick one.
What you'll find is a typical state looks exactly like the room.
It's smooth, homogeneous, because those are typical.
You don't need any dynamics to get a typical configuration, just pick it out of a hat.
With cosmology, that's, I believe, is the right way to look at the universe.
You don't need dynamics to smooth it out.
You just need a measure.
You need a way of counting the different possible states of a spacetime.
It's a bit mind-boggling that I have to think about the entire history of the universe and ask, how many different histories are there?
But in general relativity, that's what you have to do.
The basic object is a spacetime.
and you must count how many states are there for a spacetime.
Showing 661–680 of 2,693 · page 34 of 135
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