This puff peice is so light it's about to eminently float away on the mearest breeze.
'He [Turok] didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be center for alternative physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”'
you know something has gone wrong somewhere.
Because when you have no idea how to get to quantum gravity, shutting down "unusual things in speculative direction" is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with nothing.
Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!?
If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place.
I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment.
Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Scie...
Edit: made my statement less sloppy
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150130-joint-dust-analysis-...
The problem of quantum gravity, which the Perimeter Institute was originally set up to tackle, is as foundational theoretical work as you get. Yet Another Cosmological Model is not. The latter is several layers of "less foundational" further up. It has nothing to do with quantum gravity. (Neither does the article you linked; I have no idea what you're trying to say with that reference.)
You ask "why else is Turok considered more credible". More credible than what? If you mean as an expert on quantum gravity, he is not; AFAIK he has never even worked on the subject. That's the point. His appointment as director signaled a complete change of direction for the Perimeter Institute.
If she had developed other lines of work so that people would scratch her back.....if you're looking at it from a faculty hiring point of view you're usually going to favor the person who "plays nice with others". Hans Bethe saved Ken Wilson's bacon at Cornell for years, until Wilson got the Nobel Prize. Peter Higgs almost got fired at Edinburgh. Gell-Mann protected John Schwarz at Caltech, etc, etc. She had no political cover.
> She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales.
> I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out
Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?
You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.
And a huge gain for everyone else?