Neil Turok
Neil Geoffrey Turok (born 1958 in Johannesburg) is a South African theoretical physicist and astrophysicist.
Turoks parents were anti-apartheid activists. Turok studied at Churchill College, Cambridge University and received his doctorate at Imperial College in London with David Olive. Then he was at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at Fermilab near Chicago. In 1994 he became a professor at Princeton University. From 1997 he was professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge (England). In 2008 he was Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario ( Canada).
Turok mainly dealt with cosmology, where he among other things, 1996 predicted with Robert Crittenden for existence of a large cosmological constant correlations in the cosmic microwave background radiation ( CMB). , Which was confirmed by WMAP precision measurements of the anisotropies of the CMB in 2005.
Turok became known in the 1980s by suspicions that topological defects (such as cosmic strings), so-called textures, could serve as an explanation for the formation of galaxies. However, this was first disproved in 1997 by him and even employees from the COBE observations. 2007, this possibility was, however, by the discovery of the CMB cold spot ( a region of about 5 degrees of spatial expansion - large compared to the typical fluctuations of 1 degree - and about 70 micro Kelvin colder than the mean CMB temperature) in the WMAP data revived. There are but other explanations in question.
Turok is one of the originators of the theory of open inflation, in an inflationary, open universe inside of " bubbles " from the decay of a "wrong" ( metastable ) vacuum is created. At the suggestion of Stephen Hawking he examined in 1998 the creation of an open inflationary universes in the " no- boundary " description of quantum cosmology by James Hartle and Hawking, leading to the introduction of the Hawking - Turok instanton solutions ( tunnel effect ) solutions led to can describe the birth of inflationary universes open, without the hypothesis of a false vacuum. With Paul Steinhardt he later developed the theory of cyclic universes from a collision of branes in string theories advanced ( Ekpyrotisches universe ). Within this model can be determined by Turok and Steinhardt also the development of a very small cosmological constant understand.
In 2003 he founded the " African Institute for Mathematical Sciences" ( AIMS) in Muizenberg, the graduate students in mathematics and theoretical physics is to form from all over Africa. In 2008 he was awarded the TED prize.
Writings
- Steinhardt, Turok "Endless Universe Beyond the Big Bang ", Random House, 2007 ( popular science book about their theory of a cyclic universe)
- Turok, Steinhardt "Beyond inflation - a cyclic universe scenario", Nobel Symposium 2003
- Turok, Steinhardt "The cyclic universe - an informal introduction", 2002
- Crittenden, Turok (Editor) Structure Formation in the Universe, NATO Science Series C, Volume 565, 2001