Perimeter Public Lectures

From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, nothing has had a more profound influence on the world than our understanding of the materials around us. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Information Revolution of the 20th were fueled by humankind’s ability to understand, harness, and control materials.

Science is like puzzle-solving. Making sense of quantum theory is a particularly thorny kind of brain-twister, with more than its fair share of mysteries. If you are stuck on a puzzle, it may be because you have made a false assumption about the nature of some entity that is absolutely central to the whole business. If so, you have made a category mistake: you are not just wrong about what this entity is, but about what sort of thing it is.

Are we standing on the brink of a new scientific revolution that will radically change our views on space, time, and gravity?

In most circumstances, the theories of Einstein and Newton adequately describe gravity, but on cosmological scales, big questions arise, particularly surrounding the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

More than a billion years ago, two black holes collided. In the final second of their long life together, the black holes banged out a rhythm like mallets on a drum, creating gravitational waves – ripples in the shape of spacetime. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of such waves, though it seemed improbable – if not outright impossible – that we’d ever be able to actually detect them. They were long considered too faint for any earthbound experiment to measure.