Neil Turok: The Simplest Theory That Explains Everything
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2024
⏱️ 120 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Professor, there's a quote from you, |
| 0:02.0 | The Big Bang is a mirror. Explain. |
| 0:05.0 | So this is a new hypothesis we're exploring. |
| 0:10.0 | It is, I would say, a development of an approach Stephen Hawking proposed. |
| 0:17.0 | You know, Hawking was obviously wondering about how the universe could come out of a singularity, |
| 0:24.6 | and that's maybe the most fundamental mystery in cosmology and basic physics. |
| 0:31.6 | How did everything we see come out of a single point? |
| 0:35.6 | That's what the Einstein equations imply, and it's very mysterious indeed. |
| 0:41.3 | So Hawking's picture was very geometrical. He said, let's trace the Big Bang back to the singularity. |
| 0:48.3 | Space is shrinking to a very small point. We can sort of think of this like a cone whose tip is sharp. |
| 0:57.0 | And so if you like the cross sections of the cone, as you go up the cone, that's time, |
| 1:02.2 | and the cross sections denote space. |
| 1:05.0 | And so the cross sections are a circle, which is shrinking to a point at the Big Bang. |
| 1:10.6 | So Hawking's idea was to essentially round off that sharp tip |
| 1:15.5 | by going to imaginary time instead of real time. |
| 1:21.2 | So as long as you solve the Einstein equations in real time, |
| 1:26.1 | the existence of a singularity is unavoidable. |
| 1:30.9 | One can show that you're just forced to hit a singularity at the Big Bang. |
| 1:36.0 | This is Hawking's singularity theorem. |
| 1:39.2 | But if you make time, instead of going along the real axis of the complex plane towards T |
| 1:47.1 | T equals zero, if it makes a bend and goes up the imaginary axis, then the space becomes |
| 1:53.9 | Euclidean, not Laurentian. So the metric is plus DT squared plus dx squared. |
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