Segment used with permission from Wired Magazine

The BlackBerry Brain Trust 

by Duff McDonald

Piloting his Taser sailboat off the shore of Lake Ontario on a beautiful fall day, Lee Smolin looks like a screenwriter's vision of a scientist - wire-rimmed glasses, a scraggly beard, and windblown hair - squeezed into a head-to-toe black wet suit. (Subsequent meetings will confirm that he always looks like that, minus the wet suit.) He's the archetypal Perimeter researcher, full of respect for the world's great theoretical physics locales - the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, and CERN in Geneva. He is also quite happy to point out how Perimeter is, well, better.

"IAS is a great place," he says. "And they have this beautiful lunchroom with long tables. But one of their professors told us that for more than 30 years, the particle physicists have been eating at the same table, the astrophysicists at another, and the mathematicians at a third. So what did he advise us? No long tables. We want people to talk to each other."

It sounds almost silly, but this is the kind of thing they're always saying at Perimeter: The key to solving the most challenging scientific problems might be in the simplest of ideas, like the length of the tables in the bistro.

The new building incorporates a lot of that kind of thinking. It has a plenty of natural light and places for spontaneous discussion. A foosball table in the second-floor lounge has already become a popular venue for brainstorming and blowing off steam. The architects designed a nook for an old Mendelssohn piano from Perimeter's former HQ (a bar before it was a think tank). And chalkboards are everywhere, even in the outdoor atrium.

Of course, it helps to have a few of the top scientific minds on the planet. Smolin propounds a "fecund universe" theory holding that every black hole leads to another universe. Raymond Laflamme, the information theorist who changed Stephen Hawking's mind on the direction of time in a contracting universe, was lured to Perimeter from Los Alamos National Lab. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara figured out how to introduce causality into loop quantum gravity theory.

The list goes on, totaling 39 appointees, postdocs, and grad students. The only scientist at Perimeter over 50, John Moffat, was a starving artist in Copenhagen when he wrote Einstein a letter in 1953, questioning the assumptions of unified field theory. It was an audacious move for someone who'd taught himself physics, but Einstein wrote back. The two maintained a correspondence and friendship until a few months before the older scientist's death.

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