Neil Turok
Neil Geoffrey Turok holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics (1967) at
Cambridge University. He was born in 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of Ben and Mary Turok, activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the
African National Congress. After graduating from
Churchill College, Cambridge, Neil gained his doctorate from
Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Professor David Olive, one of the inventors of
superstring theory. After a postdoctoral post at Santa Barbara, he was an associate scientist at
Fermilab, Chicago. In 1992 he was awarded the
James Clerk Maxwell medal of the
Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Physics at
Princeton University, and before moving to his current position in 1997.
Turok has worked in a number of areas of mathematical physics and early universe physics, focusing on observational tests of fundamental physics in
cosmology. In the early 90's his group showed how the polarisation and temperature anisotropies of the
cosmic background radiation would be correlated, a prediction which has been confirmed in detail by recent precision measurements by the
WMAP satellite. They also developed a key test for the presence of a
cosmological constant, also recently confirmed. Turok and collaborators developed the theory of open inflation. With
Stephen Hawking, he later developed the so-called Hawking-Turok instanton solutions which, according to the no-boundary proposal of Hawking and
James Hartle, can describe the birth of an
inflationary universe.
Most recently, with
Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, Turok has been developing a
cyclic model for the universe, in which the big bang is explained as a collision between two "brane-worlds" in
M theory. The predictions of this model are in agreement with current cosmological data, but there are interesting differences with the predictions of cosmological inflation which will be probed by future experiments. In 2006, Steinhardt and Turok showed how the cyclic model could naturally incorporate a mechanism for relaxing the
cosmological constant to very small values, consistent with current observations. In 2003, Professor Turok founded the
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, a postgraduate educational centre supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent.
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Neil Turok's home page
