Neil Turok
Neil Turok’s Wish
How TED helped:
- Based on a highly successful existing prototype, attracted support to build centers of excellence in Africa, recruiting outstanding students from all over the continent and the best lecturers from all over the world. The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town is a proven model for the Next Einstein from Africa initiative. Recruiting 50 students a year from across Africa, its innovative course teaches cutting-edge skills and provides exposure to a wide range of science and technology disciplines. At the same time, it serves as a vehicle for cultural understanding and learning among the diverse student population.
- Launched the Next Einstein from Africa program, at the opening of the new Research Centre at AIMS on May 12, 2008. Attendees included Stephen Hawking, David Gross (Nobel Prize for Physics, 2004), George Smoot (Nobel Prize for Physics, 2006), Mike Griffin (head of NASA), and the South African Ministers of Education and of Science and Technology.
- Razorfish built the Next Einstein site highlighting successful students like the AIMS graduates, providing inspiration and encouragement to others.
- Developed a roll-out plan for 15 AIMS across Africa under the umbrella of The Next Einstein Initiative.
What we are still looking for:
- Individual and corporate commitments of expertise to help build the proposed network of AIMS centers, including project management and management consultancy, academic/teaching, legal, financial/auditing, IT, PR, property development, diplomatic expertise/connections, design.
- A production company to travel to Cape Town to film and interview young African scientists (around the May 12, 2008, launch) to create core content for the website
- Vital material support in the form of computers, communications and Internet equipment, books, software, office equipment, security equipment.
- Marketing and creative campaign help
- Media partners
- PR
- Endowments, sponsorships, funding
About Neil Turok
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.