And with that, Markopoulou-Kalamara gives a shrug. He wasn’t on-site on this momentous day: he was at home, attempting to summon the intellectual calm and courage needed to confront his potentially universe-shattering hunch. “He’s flipping out.”ĭreyer, 38, is visiting Perimeter from his post as a Marie Curie Fellow at Imperial College in London, England. “He thinks he’s found the solution to quantum gravity,” she says. One of them, her husband Olaf Dreyer, had recently experienced an eureka moment. She makes efforts to tone down her exuberant European elegance to match the company she keeps-that is, variously aggressive, cavalier and nerdy male physicists. A part-time painter and the child of two successful sculptors, Markopoulou-Kalamara is the only female faculty member at Perimeter. Today it was Markopoulou-Kalamara, 36, who was lamenting a physicist-husband gone mad. Faced with Freidel’s delirious state of distraction, his wife reportedly pleaded with a colleague: “Can’t you do something? He’s going insane.” Gathered around the corner table sits a representative sampling of the Institute’s international flavour: Sundance Bilson-Thompson, a post-doc researcher from Australia Richard Cleve, a Canadian quantum information theorist Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara from Greece and Frenchman Laurent Freidel, who last year went two weeks without sleep while in hot pursuit of a mathematical solution for the strong force, one of the four basic forces in nature (the others being gravity, the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force). He wanders into the Bistro and settles himself down across the way. Lee Smolin, Perimeter’s reluctant éminence grise-and author of the recent book The Trouble With Physics-also arrives at work not much before twelve this Wednesday, having made the commute from Toronto. To wit, one faculty member, England’s Lucien Hardy, regularly arrives at Perimeter just in time for lunch, having worked into the wee hours of the night (nighttime being the only time when the bustle of the place falls quiet). Many of them can be found at the Perimeter Institute, obsessing over the problem around the clock. In fact, only a select few-maybe 2 percent worldwide-spend any significant amount of time thinking about it. Most physicists don’t lose any sleep over the fact that the universe is divided into two theories. A successful soufflé of particles with gravity, so to speak, would amount to nothing less than the “theory of everything,” or TOE, that has eluded physicists ever since their ancestor Einstein lay on his deathbed frantically running the equations in his head. Relativity pertains to the very large, such as gravity it’s important for the study of astronomy and cosmology. Quantum theory pertains to things on a very small scale, such as particles it’s important for the study of chemistry and atomic physics. The marriage of these two theories of the universe-incomplete on their own, but incompatible with each other-is the coveted Rosetta stone of physics. Amid the mounting clatter and chatter, conversation at a corner table moves from one universal subject to another: from the questionable authenticity of the buffet chicken to the union of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It’s lunchtime at the Black Hole Bistro, an in-house restaurant at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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