Massey 5 - The opportunity of all time

Monday 4 February 2013 8:05PM (view full episode)

We are analogue beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future – so physicist Neil Turok. He predicts that we are facing the most significant transformation of all time. We have already seen how mobile communication and the World Wide Web are opening up global society, providing information and education on a scale vastly larger than ever before. But this is only the beginning of how our new technologies will change us

For copyright reasons there is no download or stream of this program, but you can access the audio on the linked CBC site.

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Neil Turok
Director of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, previously professor of physics at Princeton and Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge.


The Universe Within From Quantum to Cosmos
Neil Turok


Paul Barclay
Karin Zsivanovits

Comments (3)

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  • Fred Richardson :

    05 Feb 2013 11:56:11am

    Look here, I don’t actually think I can type and phrase a digital statement that comes any where near to being analogous to expressing my gratitude to ABC for broadcasting this series.
    It is up there in my top 5 most enjoyable, challenging, thought provoking and edutaining deliveries I’ve ever heard in 20 years of listening to ABC/rn science content. Neil Turok has delivered a quantum womb with a view, to the void. All the underpinning science and philosophy content contained in this 2012 Massey’s has been wonderfully covered by ABC/rn over the years, and though I still can’t get my head around the reality of quantum mechanics, the vista from Turok’s shoulders is just staggering.
    It’s just epic story weaving. This simply elegant tour de force of at least 30 odd orders of magnitude [from the capacity of the LHC to resolve weak nuclear force dimensions to telescopes offering us the warm glow of the microwave background radiation] has offered no predictions. It has however allowed me to wonder, agog, about the emergent consequences that may evolve, if we can just keep it together long enough, to transition from analogue entities existing in a digital domain to quantum augmented citizens, quacs.
    I give it one qbit out of digital ten. Thank you Mr Turok, ditto ABC/rn.

  • paul leonard hill :

    05 Feb 2013 8:50:48pm

    It is wrong for Neil Turok to talk about dark energy as if was a proven entity. It is merely a theoretical postulate to explain the expanding Universe which began to accelerate about 7 billion years ago.

    Paul Davies says that the Universe has to expand to absorb the heat generated by the formation of stars, otherwise they could not form, ie there has to be heat 'sink'. It's the same with photosynthesis. Unless there is water transpiration to cool one side of the reaction ie absorb the heat then photosynthesis couldn't work. Peltier power chips, steam engines etc. Compress air and it gets hotter because X amounts of heat energy in a smaller space increases the temperature. The opposite with decompressing. (Noooo, I'm not suggesting that there is air in space.)

    The TRANSMISSION through space of photons of light/heat of different wavelengths, plus gamma rays and X rays, neutrinos, etc. must require more space as they increase in number with increased star formation which, according to this theory, must have increased dramatically 7 billion years ago. So more heat means an expanding Universe. What about the flip side?

    When a star become massive enough, perhaps by two or more stars combining, and it runs out of fuel to keep it in an expanded state it collapses in on itself and the gravitational field is so massive that all of its positively charged protons and it's negatively charged electrons are crushed into each other to form neutrons with their neutral charge. These neutrons combine with the neutrons already in the nucleus of the former atoms, and no longer held apart by the protons and electrons of these atoms become so densely packed that a teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons (so were told!) and exert massive gravitational field. A neutron star.

    Okay, then, with all thermonuclear reactions quelled because these require the fusion of atoms, the neutron star must be COLD, absolute zero or even colder if that's possible. When two or more neutron stars combine to form a black hole even the neutrons disappear. So what the Hell is black hole, an area of NOTHING, not space but nothing, yet with a MASSIVE gravitational field, so massive that it forms the nucleus of a galaxy, holding the galaxy together and the galaxy holding the NOTHING from collapsing. Two different FORMS of gravity?

    Now as black holes gobble up stars and planets that stray into their 'event horizon' and so get bigger and more voracious COLD is now getting on top of HOT until finally all of the galaxies, gas and dust get gobbled up. With no more of this stuff to keep the black holes apart they rush into each other and the combined super massive, horrifically gargantuan gravitational field pulls them into ABSOLUTE NOTHING. No time, no space, zero everything.

    Thus it is the shear TERROR of nothing which must bring something.

  • Alter Nate :

    08 Feb 2013 11:28:46am

    Oh, so the schizophrenics were right all along!