Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Can we detect consciousness in patients who can't communicate? Scientists used a simple task—imagining playing tennis—to activate specific brain regions, revealing hidden awareness. #Neuroscience #Consciousness #BrainImaging #MedicalBreakthrough #KateThePatient Full Podcast with Prof. Adrian Owen: youtu.be/o5eCayRcIAY
Can we detect consciousness in patients who can't communicate? Scientists used a simple task—imagining playing tennis—to activate specific brain regions, revealing hidden awareness. #Neuroscience #Consciousness #BrainImaging #MedicalBreakthrough #KateThePatient Full Podcast with Prof. Adrian Owen: youtu.be/o5eCayRcIAY

![This Physicist May Have Just Solved Quantum Gravity
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This is a breaking podcast. Were 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 theorys necessity. Drop it, and the whole case for a multiverse unravels. Neil graciously gave me a sneak peek at his and his PhD student Sam Batemans new research. Bleeding edge! I hope you enjoy.
TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00:00 - Quadratic Gravity Emergence
- 00:05:03 - Renormalization and Asymptotic Freedom
- 00:10:57 - Ghosts and Krein Spaces
- 00:16:00 - Generalizing the Born Rule
- 00:23:27 - Ostrogradsky Instability Reinterpreted
- 00:31:29 - UV Completeness and QCD
- 00:38:21 - Higgs Compositeness and Hierarchy
- 00:43:58 - CPT Symmetric Universe Minimalism
- 00:52:54 - The 36 Fields Mystery
- 01:00:10 - Orthodoxy vs. Revolutionary Ideas
- 01:06:39 - Gravitational Entropy and Smoothness
- 01:16:14 - Multiverse Measure Problem
- 01:23:05 - Theoretical Physics Health
- 01:30:07 - Sam Bateman’s Breakthrough
- 01:43:33 - Philosophy of Cosmology
LINKS MENTIONED:
- Neils Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/985402
- Renormalization of Higher-Derivative Quantum Gravity [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.16.953
- Quadratic Gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_gravity
- Asymptotic Freedom in Higher-Derivative Quantum Gravity [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0370269385902485
- Ostrogradskys Theorem: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Ostrogradskys_theorem_on_Hamiltonian_instability
- Krein Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_inner_product_space
- CPT-Symmetric Universe [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08928
- Pathologies of Dimension-Zero Scalar Fields [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05683
- No-Ghost Theorem for Pais-Uhlenbeck Oscillator [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0207
- Cancelling the Vacuum Energy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06258
- Gravitational Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07279
- Neils Lecture: https://pirsa.org/15100070
- Neil Turok on the Big Bang [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ZUp9x44N3uE
- Neil Turok on Black Holes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/zNZCa1pVE20
- Carlo Rovelli [TOE]: https://youtu.be/hF4SAketEHY
- Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok
- Jacob Barandes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/wrUvtqr4wOs
- Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE
- Harvey Friedman [TOE]: https://youtu.be/gx3uKT1qJvY
- Scott Aaronson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/1ZpGCQoL2Rk
- David Deutsch [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vKeWv-cdWkM
- Peter Woit & Joseph Conlon [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fAaXk_WoQqQ
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