Firstly, thank you all for you kind messages regarding my health update a few days ago. It means so much to both me and my wife…
Secondly, we just finished editing this episode with Neil Turok and I think you’ll enjoy it.
Turok, the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh and former director of Perimeter Institute, returns to quadratic gravity in four dimensions...
He (and his PhD student Sam Bateman) found a way to circumvent what is ordinarily thought to be a death blow to a theory (namely, negative norms). He basically embraces them and reinterprets them.
We cover:
The Hilbert-space assumption: not as a casual rejection of quantum mechanics, but as a question about what this construction actually requires.
Krein spaces (or the mathematical setting where an indefinite inner product can be treated systematically)
Why curvature-squared gravity was attractive in the first place: renormalizability, ultraviolet behavior, and a four-dimensional path that looked too sim…
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