Building an environment that attracts leading mind

In July of 2008 a rumour began to circulate in the non-scientific world about the potential relocation of the planet's most famous living physicist.

A leading British newspaper wrote that Stephen Hawking was increasingly unhappy at the University of Cambridge (est. 1209) and was considering moving to Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario (est. 2001). The article said that Hawking, who holds the same Cambridge professorship that Isaac Newton once did, was fed up with the lack of basic research funding in the U.K. and was being lured by the enthusiastic support for theoretical physics found at Perimeter.

While it was subsequently revealed that Hawking is coming to Perimeter for a short period to conduct some research - and not to decamp from the U.K. entirely - the most interesting thing for many was that the exaggerated story hadn't been dismissed when it first appeared.

It wasn't as if anyone with half a jigger of judgment would know that the world's brightest and best-known light in physics - so well known, indeed, that he has been respectfully labelled a "sci-lebrity" - would never ever consider relocating to the Ontario hinterlands.

"If someone had told you seven years ago that Stephen Hawking was coming to a little Ontario city, you would have just laughed, but now people wondered if it was really true," remarks Ray Laflamme, who did his PhD under Hawking at Cambridge and is now one of Perimeter's researchers.

It made sense because hadn't Hawking's Cambridge compatriot Dr. Neil Turok announced months before that he was leaving the British university to become executive director of Perimeter? (Turok did complain about British research funding stinginess.) And hadn't American Daniel Gottesman, who'd been chosen by MIT's Technology Review magazine in 2003 as one of the world's top young innovators, moved to Perimeter? Weren't Lee Smolin and Fotini Markopoulou, who were big noises in the field where gravity melts into what is called quantum gravity, also at PI?

And weren't there Canadians who were lured back before they could even leave?

"For my family, coming to Perimeter meant staying in Canada," reflects Rob Myers, who came from McGill. "When I was recruited here, I was already looking for a new position, and at that time it seemed inevitable that this would require moving to the U.S. This was a really tough choice for my wife and I since we are both Canadians and preferred to raise our three daughters here. Of course, when the opportunity came to stay in Canada at PI, I - we - jumped on it."

The question is why Perimeter has been so successful in attracting so much talent in such a short time. Clearly, having the funds to pay competitive salaries for the world's best theoreticians counts, as does having the freedom to conduct research and not necessarily teach classes; but so too does designing a building the express purpose of which was to exhibit and nurture the brainy creativity that is associated with Einsteins past and future.

"The building is critical," says John Matlock, director of External Relations and Outreach at Perimeter, as he sits in the Institute's Black Hole Bistro, a rooftop locale that serves as a jazz venue and offers food that is a universe beyond what one gets in a university cafeteria. "There are three kinds of areas in the building that were purposely designed to foster productive research. And it's important to know that the original researchers, the faculty members here who started from day one, had a lot of input in what physically took shape."

One type of space is the contemplative offices in which Perimeter physicists can think their deep thoughts.

"You have a peaceful view of the lake. You can sit alone to ponder and calculate. You can also collaborate with others around the world using various desktop technologies. You can enjoy fresh air through the crank-open windows, customize your heat and air-conditioning and even dim the lights to any setting that is most comfortable. Offices are the scientists' labs, and we're doing everything possible to attract and equip them with the tools and technology needed to make them a peaceful and productive environment," says Matlock.

The second sorts of areas are highly interactive "think" spaces. These are larger places where researchers spontaneously cluster - think coming for a cup of cappuccino - begin to talk and then actively interact using those ancient tools of the physics trade, chalk and blackboard.

"There are no clocks there. The key point is that different people are collaborating all the time - for two minutes or two hours at a stretch. These are the kinds of multidisciplinary lab spaces that break down barriers. We wanted to shake things up and avoid having scientists specializing in one area of study locked into separate places and, in a way, into separate mental zones," says Matlock.

The aim to foster spontaneous collaborations seems to be working, as Matlock says there are already examples of theories and propositions coming out of Perimeter that were the fruits of chance interactions in the think spaces.

In addition, Perimeter was designed to include formal places for traditional research activities - a two-storey library, a theatre space for conferences and lecture rooms with a singularly profound difference. Cameras that are set to video the ubiquitous blackboards can link the captured information into what is known as PIRSA - the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive. As fast as scientists share research activities with others in PI's seminar rooms, their talks and calculations go up on a special website where they are readily accessible to the international physics community.

The underlying idea is to leverage the power of the Internet and build upon the old one-way communication of a scientific paper where someone publishes results but receives little immediate feedback from his or her peers.

"When a popular author publishes a book for the public, they try to talk about it on Oprah, right?" says Matlock. "Well, when a theoretical physicist publishes interesting work, where can they go to discuss the content among knowledgeable colleagues and share the fine-grain details with the entire international scientific community? Many are coming to PIRSA. It provides a very efficient way to transfer knowledge throughout the global research chain."

As the scientists share and debate their ideas, expressed in the form of chalkboard equations, PI's PIRSA captures the mathematical formulas in a freeze-frame every 10 seconds or so alongside a second image of the speaker. There are now hundreds of lectures, colloquia and workshop proceedings in PIRSA's collection.

Just as important as the research is the building's public role in sharing the culture of science with the wider community. For example, Dr. Turok recently gave a standing-room-only presentation entitled "What Banged?" which laid out, in layman's terms, a theory that the big bang isn't unique and is part of a cyclical model where one bang is followed by another in a potentially endless series of cosmic births.

In a strictly cultural vein, world-famous musicians, including famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma and multimedia artist Brian Eno, perform public concerts in the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas.

And finally, the building's external architecture itself tries to visually express the essence of the deep thinking going on inside. Its southern facade is a scattered quilt of windows and ventilation grills of different sizes, shapes and placements that are framed with mirrors. The fact that these alter in appearance as lighting and weather conditions change is no mistake, building architect Gilles Saucier has said.

His idea was to mimic, through design, the startle many of us have experienced when confronting the shifting esoteric ideas and theories that theoretical physics throws at us.

Further to this, the building design itself has won six major awards, including the 2006 Governor General's Award for superior architecture. At that time, Amale Andraos, a member of that jury, wrote, "The exterior facade's almost hyper-real resolution in a kind of scientific expression announces to its surroundings the exciting intellectual endeavours happening on the inside."

How effective is the architecture at expressing and enhancing the physics? One can't yet say it has made Perimeter's science better than elsewhere, but there is an effect. "At some level, design is playing a role for sure," says Myers, pointing particularly to the virtues of spontaneous interactions.

The building also expresses Perimeter's ambitious desired goal to bring the mysteries of theoretical physics to the wider world. Written in Greek above one of the entranceways is a revision of the words first set over the doors of Plato's Academy: "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here." A plaque then explains, "In recognition of PI's commitment to share the joy of discovery with the wider community, the Greek version has been modified to state, 'Let no one uninterested in geometry enter here.'"