CBC Massey Lectures get cosmic with physicist Neil Turok

If your mental diet could use a little less Honey Boo Boo and a little more theoretical physics, head to the Chan Centre tomorrow evening (October 16) for the local stop in the annual nationwide tour that is the CBC Massey Lectures.

This year’s lecturer is Neil Turok, former prof at Cambridge and Princeton, intellectual teammate of noted brainbox Stephen Hawking, and author of such breezy titles as Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang—Rewriting Cosmic History. His new book containing his five Massey talks is called The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos.

Don’t worry if your grasp of relativistic wave equations isn’t what it once was. The Waterloo, Ontario–based physicist is speaking the language of the general public here. Even though his subject dwarfs pretty much everything else, the focus of the series as a whole is human in scale. Turok sees our species as standing on the brink of a scientific revolution, where we can understand “how our ideas regarding our place in the universe may develop, and how our very nature may change.”

Tickets are $25, and $15 for students and seniors. The blowing of minds gets under way at 8 p.m.