Neil Turok: A Route to Quantum Gravity (Without Strings)
About this episode
Neil Turok discusses a new paradigm for quantizing 4D gravity without strings, based on quadratic gravity.
SPONSORS: - Exclusive Plaud Prime Day discount for Curt's viewers: use code CURT for up to 20% OFF at https://www.plaud.ai/curt - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a breaking podcast. We're premiering a new paradigm for quantizing 4D gravity here first, without strings. Neil Turok — inaugural Higgs Chair at Edinburgh, former director of Perimeter Institute, and 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society — believes quantum gravity may not require strings, extra dimensions, or a multiverse. The key: a 1970s theory called quadratic gravity, long abandoned over two seemingly fatal problems. Turok and Bateman argue both problems dissolve — one by reinterpreting a classical instability as ordinary gravitational expansion, the other by a subtle tweak to the Born rule that allows quantum states of negative norm without ever producing negative probabilities. One quiet assumption, Turok argues, underpins decades of string theory's necessity. Drop it, and the whole case for…
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