Neil Turok
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Cosmologist and education activist
"All of the details of the laws of physics are actually determined by the structure of the universe; specifically, by the arrangement of tiny, curled-up extra dimensions of space."
Neil Turok holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. In 1992 he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics.
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 polarization 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 mission. The team also developed a key test for the presence of the cosmological constant, also recently confirmed.
Turok and collaborators developed the theory of open inflation. With Stephen Hawking, he later developed the Hawking-Turok instanton solutions, describing 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. 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. Steinhardt and Turok cowrote the recent popular science book Endless Universe.
In 2003, Turok, who was born in South Africa, founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, a postgraduate educational center supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent.
