Neil Turok
South African theoretical physicist
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Through Cosmic microwave background
Early life and career
Turok was born on 16 November 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Mary Turok and Byelorussian-born Ben Turok, who were activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress. After graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge, Turok gained his doctorate from Imperial College, London, under the supervision of David Olive, one of the inventors of superstring theory. After a postdoctoral post at Santa Barbara, he was an associate scientist at Fermilab, Illinois.
In 1992 Turok was awarded the Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University, then held the Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge starting in 1997. He was appointed Director of the Perimeter Institute in 2008. In 2020, Turok was appointed as the Inaugural Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh.
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Research and other contributions
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 1990s, his group showed how the polarisation and temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic microwave background would be correlated, a prediction which has been confirmed in detail by recent precision measurements by the WMAP spacecraft. 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.
Together with Justin Khoury, Burt Ovrut and Paul Steinhardt, Turok introduced the notion of the Ekpyrotic Universe, "... a cosmological model in which the hot big bang universe is produced by the collision of a brane in the bulk space with a bounding orbifold plane, beginning from an otherwise cold, vacuous, static 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 (probably by the Planck space observatory). 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 2007, Steinhardt and Turok co-authored the popular science book Endless Universe. In 2012, Turok's Massey Lectures were published as The Universe Within: from Quantum to Cosmos.
In 2003, Turok founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, a postgraduate educational centre supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent.