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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I think the field has been very poor about strategizing its own future.

Theorists like me are so fascinated with what they're doing, they don't actually spend the time to think, how do we keep the field healthy?

Especially all about young people and about encouraging diversity of cultures, of outlooks, of origins, of points of view.

too often the older people encourage orthodoxy, which is very unhealthy.

So, yeah, I think it's rather poor at looking after itself and keeping healthy.

Perimeter was an incredible opportunity because it had very good support from a donor, the government matched it, and we had amazing freedom.

So I enjoyed it like crazy.

It's doing very well now.

But to be honest, I feel that in my role as director who built it substantially, I was probably too conservative.

The whole challenge is to persuade government to keep funding you.

It's easiest to make the case if you're getting high citations and you're stealing people from Harvard or whatever well-known places.

So the temptation is to evaluate yourself by the standards of the majority or the orthodoxy.

And I think that's unfortunate because it's really crucial to the health of the field to promote people doing unorthodox directions.

There's not enough of that happening.

So my worry about Perimeter is that it must continue to promote foundational thinking and especially young people who...

are questioning the orthodoxy.

That's tough to do in today's climate where people are worried about getting jobs and next grant and everything seems insecure.

But I think the very instability of the world today

Although it's awful and frightening and worrying.

Who knows what will happen with AI?

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