This is my last piece for today, March 18, 2014 As I noted earlier , I wish I could cover everyone. For this session I’m covering Neil Turok, physicist and director of the Perimeter Institute, from his TED biography (Note: Links have been removed),
Neil Turok is working on a model of the universe that explains the big bang — while, closer to home, he’s founded a network of math and science academies across Africa.
Neil Turok works on understanding the universe’s very beginnings. With Stephen Hawking, he developed the Hawking-Turok instanton solutions, describing the birth of an inflationary universe — positing that, big bang or no, the universe came from something, not from utter nothingness.
Recently, with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, Turok has been working on a cyclic model for the universe in which the big bang is explained as a collision between two “brane-worlds.” The two physicists cowrote the popular-science book Endless Universe.
In 2003, Turok, who was born in South Africa, founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, a postgraduate center supporting math and science. His TED Prize wish: Help him grow AIMS and promote the study and math and science in Africa, so that the world’s next Einstein may be African.
Turok is the Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada. In 2010, the Canadian government funded a $20million expansion of the AIMS schools, working with the Perimeter Institute to start five new AIMS schools in different African nations.
I featured Turok in an Oct.17, 2012 posting about purpose in nature and in the universe.
Thankfully, Turok was not reading aloud as he did in 2012 when he was in Vancouver with his ‘What banged?’ talk and he immediately engaged the audience with his stories about AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) in particular about two AIMS students, Marciel (?) and Kitsis (?) who have gone on to postgraduate degrees and work respectively in the fields of tropical medicine and fluid mechanics.
He segued to quantum physics and how important quantum computing will be in the future and will change everything and how we need to help Africa prepare for the quantum future.
I was a little confused by Turok’s plea to help Africa achieve a quantum future as it seemed to me that AIMS and efforts like that would mean that Africa and Africans might lead in the future, quantum or otherwise.
That’s it for me today. This is a very intriguing session although despite its title seems primarily focused on brains over beauty, which has scarcely been mentioned.