Neil Turok

Fundamental physics has reached a turning point. Watch live at 7 p.m. ET Wednesday when the director of the Perimeter Institute considers the possibilities

Neil Turok calls the discovery of ripples in space-time ‘absolutely spectacular, if it’s correct.’

When I met Neil Turok to discuss the 15-year-old Jacob Barnett and other developments in modern physics, the director of Perimeter Institute was wearing shorts and a floral shirt. The South African cosmologist had been on vacation — still was, technically. But he plainly missed his Canadian home base. I had asked to meet him in Perimeter’s sunny white-furnished ground-floor bistro. But everyone else was there, so it took us a moment to shake ourselves free. Turok paused to say hello to Raymond Laflamme, who runs Perimeter’s cross-town partner the Institute for Quantum Computing, and John Berlinsky, who runs the Perimeter Scholars International program in which Jacob Barnett is the youngest student.

Neil Turok talks to Paul Wells about the ever-increasing complexity of theoretical physics

Science’s big bet paid off when the ‘God particle’ was discovered courtesy of the monstrous Hadron Collider

Not always. Some things matter more than class size.

Why are we here? One of the world’s greatest physicists on the search for answers

“One rarely has to wait long at Perimeter before somebody comes along with a gift of money,” I wrote in September in my account of a month at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.  Today will be another such day. But not nearly routine, even by the standards of such days.

The other $20 million the Prime Minister announced today at Perimeter Institute may be the smartest and boldest investment a Canadian government has made in development assistance in decades.

If you unleash some of those hundreds of millions of minds you help Africa and you help the world.

Last autumn I interviewed Neil Turok, the South African physicist who runs the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Our talk began in expected places and ended somewhere unusual, with Turok making a pitch for “smart aid” to Africa: an approach based on keeping some of the continent’s best minds at home, and sending them reinforcements from around the world to make Africa, at last, a centre of creation and discovery instead of subsistence and strife. Sounds mad, doesn’t it. But Turok has credentials: his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences is well begun and, he hopes, will soon have branches across the continent. The whole interview is worth re-reading, but here’s the part that launches our discussion of some tremendously exciting ideas, coming from a Canadian with African roots, that I want to share with you today. Turok told me:

Is Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute “nuts”? He thinks so. A conversation with Paul Wells.