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| Biografie van Neil Turok [boodskap #117175] |
Sat, 10 May 2008 22:59 |
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February 28, 2008
TED2008: Neil Turok, finding the African Einstein
The second prize winner this year is the remarkable scientist and
educator, Neil Turok. Turok is a cosmologist at Cambridge, but he’s
got an amazing side project - he’s built an amazing math academy in
Capetown that provides advanced training for the most promising young
African mathematicians.
Turok was born in South Africa. His father was imprisoned for
resisting the apartheid regime, and his family moved to the young
nations of Kenya and Tanzania. “We saw the wonders of the world,
Kilimanjaro, the Ulduvai Gorge…” He went to high school in London, but
came back as soon as he could, becoming a student teacher in Lesotho
when he was 17.
His students in Lesotho amazed him with their creativity. Asking
students to estimate the height of a building, he discovered a young
man measuring the height of a brick and counting bricks, getting an
extremely accurate measurement. The adults amazed him as well - the
poor miner who told him about his love of Shakespere. “If Africa is
going to get fixed, it’s these people, not us, who are going to fix
it.”
Turok talks briefly about his work in cosmology. “All we know in
physics can be expressed in a single equation.” Unfortunately, that
equation has 18 free parameters. In his work with Stephen Hawking,
Turok has attempted to understand the big bang - he tells us that he’s
still in regular tough with his primary school maths teacher, a
Scottish woman who taught him in Tanzania. She periodically asks him,
“What banged?”
Turok’s theory is that the big bang wasn’t a singularity - it was a
collision between two three-dimensional realities, which parallel each
other, separated by a tiny gap, a small fraction of the size of a
nucleus. If those two worlds intersect, “it looks a lot like the big
bang.” But if there’s a three-dimensional intersection of worlds,
there’s no singularity, and the equations don’t break down - we can
support all the data we have on background radiation. If this theory
is right, “we’ve had bangs in the past, and will hae bangs in the
future - we have an endless universe.”
Despite his success, Turok was haunted by the question, “What about
Africa?” He shows us some of the painful statistics of the continent,
visualized with maps from Worldmapper. Africa leads the world in
deaths from preventable causes, and deaths from war. It trails the
world in GDP. And it has huge limitations as far resources to solve
these problems - tiny populations of physicians, educators and
scientists. “As was very eloquently argued at TED Africa in Arusha,
aid has completely failed to put Africa on its own two feet.”
Turok’s parents were both elected to South Africa’s first post-
apartheid parliament - the only couple other than Nelson and Winnie
Mandela. Turok took a leave to visit South Africa in 2001 and realized
the nature of the desperate skill shortage. So he bought a derelict
hotel in Cape Town with 80 rooms, for $100,000, and he founded AIMS -
the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He invited lecturers
from all over the world, and students from all over continent… and
they came. In part, it helped that the hotel was near the beach. It
also helps that Turok is an amazing and passionate man whose
enthusiasm is contagious.
In AIMS, the professors and students live together, which means that
there are impromptu tutorials at 1am. There’s a strong emphasis on
skills that are relavent to Africa, including epidemeology and
financial mathematics. He walks us through the life stories of a few
of his students - they’ve ended up in amazing places, many getting
Masters and PhDs around Africa, the US and Europe. He tells us that he
can educate five times as many students at AIMS for the money it takes
to send one student to the US or Europe.
Turok shares his dream: “that the next einstein will be African.” Not
just Einstein, but the next Gates, Brin and Page. To help this happen,
he wants to scale up AIMS, building 15 centers across Africa. Each
will be pan-African, and each will focus on a different aspect of
science. The centers will teach entrepreneurship and policy skills as
well, and build a network of graduates who will help transform the
continent. The next centers are slated for Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan,
Uganda and Madagascar.
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