Perimeter Institute: A quarter-century retrospective — Chapter Two

There was a certain amount of natural skepticism when researchers were asked, around 2000, to join a brand-new Canadian theoretical physics institute in a place called Waterloo.

By the turn of the millennium, the small City of Waterloo had gained a reputation as the home of the BlackBerry smartphone and of the University of Waterloo’s top-notch computer science school. It was a growing technology hub.

But for theoretical physicists at institutes like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or MIT, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was not yet on the map.

Mike Lazaridis, who founded Research In Motion (later called BlackBerry) had injected the Institute not only with cash, but also gave his time, energy, and advice. Howard Burton (the first director) provided the drive.  

But without a team of exceptional theoretical physicists, it would have been a failed experiment. And drawing them to Waterloo was not an easy task.

Fortunately, there were a bold few who were willing to take a chance.  

String theorist and Perimeter’s future director, Rob Myers, was among the first to commit. Also joining Perimeter in the early days was Lee Smolin, co-founder of loop quantum gravity, who had already written a popular science book, The Life of the Cosmos. Quantum gravity expert Fotini Markopoulou also joined the original research faculty. All three were well-known scientists.

Quantum information luminaries Michele Mosca and Raymond LaFlamme were also involved near the start, and they led the parallel launch and development of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo in 2002 – again with funding from Lazaridis.

Rounding out Perimeter’s original nine scientists were four postdoctoral researchers: Olaf Dreyer and Oliver Winkler (quantum gravity), and John Brodie and Konstantin Savvidis (string theory).

Now boasting some legitimate expertise in string theory, quantum gravity, and quantum information, Perimeter began attracting other experts, who joined as Perimeter began operations in the former ‘Time Square’ restaurant building (renamed SpaceTime Square), a building converted from Waterloo’s old post office.  

Lucien Hardy, a quantum foundations theorist, came from Oxford University. Quantum information expert Daniel Gottesman arrived from the Microsoft Research theory group and was a Clay Mathematics Institute Prize Fellow. Quantum gravity researcher Thomas Thiemann came from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics near Potsdam, Germany.  

String theorists Jaume Gomis and Freddy Cachazo arrived around 2004-2005. Gomis had been a postdoctoral scholar at CalTech, while Cachazo came from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (Einstein’s long-time home).  

Laurent Freidel, a French mathematical physicist, visited Perimeter in its early days, while working at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. In 2006, he joined as permanent faculty.

The distinguished scientists kept coming. Maxim Pospelov arrived in the early 2000s – he had been at the University of Quebec as Perimeter was getting off the ground. Cliff Burgess, a research associate faculty at Perimeter, was at McGill University when he first visited, while the Institute was still in the old post office.

They all had one thing in common: they were talented physicists who chose to leave behind top institutions to try something new at Perimeter.

As more researchers with their various accolades joined Perimeter, it became easier to bring in new faculty, along with their promising postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. It took time, perseverance, constant optimism and faith, but gradually, the Institute grew.

Those who were around in the foundational days remember the excitement, energy, and enthusiasm as they got together at Waterloo’s homespun haunts, like Mel’s Diner, to talk about physics and about who to bring to the Institute. Waterloo Region was, at the time, a community transitioning from its earlier roots in manufacturing into a Canadian high-tech hub. It was an entrepreneurial community, and Perimeter Institute was a part of that.  

These were heady days when anything was possible – even making a reality out of a lofty thought experiment like Perimeter Institute.

Here are just a few of the memories from some of the early researchers who joined in the Perimeter adventure:

Robert Myers

Director Emeritus, BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics

When Myers was approached 25 years ago to join the fledgling physics institute, Perimeter was little more than a crazy idea: the idea that one could build a brand-new, world-class research institute dedicated to theoretical physics in a largely unknown city in Canada – one that would compete head-to-head with institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard in a field with traditions dating back hundreds of years to giants like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. There was certainly no guarantee of success. Instead, many (perhaps most) established luminaries believed it was destined to fail.

At the time, Myers was a full professor at McGill University and a respected Canadian scientist. He had been considering opportunities in the United States, but the prospect of uprooting his young family south of the border made the decision difficult. Leaving an established position at McGill for an unproven institute was also a major gamble for Myers and his wife – both Canadians with three young daughters. However, when the possibility to join Perimeter arose, it offered not only the exciting opportunity to build something important for Canada, but also the chance to continue raising their family there. They decided to take the risk.

“When I first arrived, I was asked if I could work at home because they really didn’t have any room for the physicists,” Myers recalls.

Two months later, the Institute moved into the Time Square restaurant, which had recently gone out of business. Myers remembers the energy in the renamed ‘Spacetime Square’ building – the informal atmosphere, the lively physics discussions, and the arrival of the first visitors. He recalls the first seminar, given by Arkady Tseytlin (a leading expert on string theory at Imperial College, London) in the fall of 2001. “There were less than a dozen of us, and we all gathered around a portable blackboard on the third floor because there was no seminar room at the time,” Myers says.

Another special moment he recalls was sitting between Steve Giddings (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Joe Lykken (from Fermilab) at an early Perimeter seminar. “I just remember thinking, ‘Yes, this is going to work,’” Myers says.

An institution builder from the start, Myers remained at Perimeter long-term and was foundational to its success. In 2019, he became Perimeter’s third executive director, following Howard Burton and Neil Turok.

Myers guided Perimeter Institute – an institution that thrives on the energy of student and faculty collaborations – through the difficult and unpredictable COVID pandemic years. When the physical facility was finally able to reopen, it remained a thriving institution, thanks in large part to his efforts.

He recently completed his five-year term as executive director and has now returned to full-time research at Perimeter, holding the position of Director Emeritus and the BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics.

“For me, it has been an incredible journey – one that continues to unfold,” Myers reflects. “I had the opportunity to come in at the ground floor and help create something new and important out of nothing, and I just think how lucky I was that I got to do that. It's something that very few people have an opportunity to do, and I’m so grateful.”

“It was incredible work and hard work,” he recalls. In addition to the excitement of physics, there were countless decisions to make – how to run an institute differently, how to identify and recruit top talent at all levels from students to faculty, how to build partnerships, and which partnerships. They also hosted visitors from around the world to showcase what was happening in Waterloo.  

“The Institute benefitted from support and goodwill from many quarters – federal and provincial governments, the board, the luminary scientists on the Scientific Advisory Committee, the University of Waterloo, and the local community,” he says.

Myers also expresses his special gratitude to Mike Lazaridis for his support and the opportunities he provided over the years. “We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude; without Mike and his vision, Perimeter simply wouldn’t exist.”

Michele Mosca

Research Associate Faculty, Perimeter Institute, Faculty, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo

Having graduated with a PhD in quantum computing algorithms from Oxford University in 1999, the Canadian-born Mosca (from the Windsor area) was already in Waterloo when Perimeter Institute was being launched.  

At the time, he was building the University of Waterloo’s first research group in quantum computing. Today he is a scientist in quantum information at the Institute for Quantum Computing, as well as research associate faculty member at Perimeter.

Mosca remembers getting a cryptic note from the first director, Howard Burton, when Perimeter was still very much in the concept stage. Burton had already reached out to Artur Ekert, who describes himself as a crypto-physicist (an expert in cryptography and physics) working on information processing and quantum mechanical systems at the University of Oxford. He knew Mosca, an expert in post-quantum cryptography, (keeping our digital information safe in the era of quantum computers that can undermine the encryption we currently have). Ekert recommended him. The fact that Ekert was supportive of the idea made Mosca much more willing to take a chance on it.

Not long after that, Mosca found himself meeting with Lazaridis. “He was already thinking bigger, about a whole ecosystem,” Mosca recalls.  

Mosca was intrigued by the Perimeter idea, but he was still wanting to build out a quantum computing group at the university. Lazaridis told him: “I will help you grow that endeavour.” And so, the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo was born, almost in parallel with the independent Perimeter Institute.  

He remembers that Perimeter’s founding administrative staff initially planned to rent more space for the Institute in the Marsland Centre, an office tower in Waterloo.  

But then the Time Square restaurant in the historic post office building became available. It was perfect. “It was cool, and we basically kept the bar,” Mosca says (though the taps were soon turned off).  

Only a few years later, ‘Spacetime Square’ was already overflowing with people, and students were occupying spaces in the dark basement, Mosca recalls.

It was time for a move. Perimeter’s new custom facility, a 65,000-square-foot building designed by Saucier + Perotte, opened its doors on October 1, 2004, on land that was previously the home of the Waterloo Memorial Arena, donated by the City of Waterloo.

Lucien Hardy

Research Faculty

Lucien Hardy, a faculty member in quantum foundations at Perimeter, was on a long-term Royal Society fellowship at Oxford University in the United Kingdom when Perimeter Institute was being formed.

He was happy at Oxford – a storied and world-renowned university – and his research was going well. By then he was well known in the quantum foundations research world for his thought experiment known as Hardy’s Paradox.  

So, when Burton contacted him, and then sent Mosca to bring him to Waterloo, Hardy had no intention of going. But Mosca somehow convinced him to board the plane and come for a visit.

When he met the other founding physicists, such as Lee Smolin, he was quickly convinced to take a chance.  

More than anything, Hardy was persuaded by the people behind this adventurous idea. “I became very impressed at the boldness of the whole endeavour, and I wanted to be a part of that,” he says.

Hardy still thinks of that old post office building as the spiritual home of Perimeter. It was a place where physics ideas were flying through the air in the collaborations at blackboards. People sometimes slept on the big couches and there were always fascinating conversations over beer and food. They lived and breathed on sparks of ideas.

“I had my office at one end of the bar and Lee Smolin had his office at the other end of the bar,” Hardy recalls. Back then, I knew every single person in the building.”

Laurent Freidel

Research Faculty

Freidel was in France teaching at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon when he first heard, through Lee Smolin, that a new institute, entirely devoted to theoretical physics, was being set up in Waterloo.

That sounded strange but “it was also enticing and exciting,” Freidel says. Freidel had been involved in the establishment of a new physics laboratory in France, so he was already the type of person who loved working on something new and fresh. He was drawn to the bold, entrepreneurial spirit of this new institute.

“There were three or four moving blackboards; there was beer on tap and unlimited sugar. People would stay and work 10 hours, 12 hours. It was like building a new company,” he says of the early years at Perimeter.

Freidel initially came as a visitor, but as soon as he saw the theoretical physics space in the old post office, filled with young people bursting with enthusiasm and excited to solve deep theoretical physics problems, he wanted to be a part of it.

There was something special about Perimeter, Freidel says. It had a highly interactive environment with people working across conventional and not-so-conventional fields. The administration team was small but supportive. There was a pioneering mindset. “It was breaking the rules of academia,” he adds.

“It was a unique place, very adventurous, with lots of new ideas and a special kind of energy. To be building this, in the early years, was quite something,” says Freidel, who became Perimeter’s ninth full-time faculty member.

Raymond Laflamme

Research Associate Faculty, Perimeter Institute, Faculty, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo (and former executive director)

For a short time, Laflamme wondered if Burton was an FBI agent.

He tells the hilarious story of meeting Burton, who insisted on visiting him in his office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, where Laflamme was pioneering quantum computing.  

At the time, people at that highly secure Los Alamos facility were having something of a paranoid panic attack, because federal agents were investigating what appeared to be a leak of classified research papers to a foreign government. As it turned out, the leak did not come from anyone at the facility, but while it was being investigated, the atmosphere was tense.

Laflamme, a Canadian from Quebec City, knew he wasn’t suspect, but naturally, anyone who was a foreigner on that campus was feeling nervous.  

So, when Burton called Laflamme and wanted to pay him a visit at his office, Laflamme gave him an emphatic “no.”

“I did not know this guy, so I said, ‘no you cannot come to my office,’” Laflamme recalls. “I started to worry that he was an FBI agent, checking on people at the lab who might let foreigners visit without permission.”

It took some convincing, but finally, Laflamme did agree to meet Burton – not in his lab or office, but in a café at the Los Alamos facility. Even while waiting for Burton to arrive, Laflamme was practically expecting to see someone in a black car wearing a black trench coat. Instead, a man in a short beard arrived and began talking about something called Perimeter Institute that Laflamme had never heard of. The man wanted names of researchers who he might recruit for the Institute.

Laflamme, still skeptical, was reluctant. He didn’t quite believe that someone was starting an entire institute for theoretical physics in Canada. “I thought, ‘what is this institute, a plaque on someone’s office door?’” Laflamme laughs. Burton “must have thought that I wasn’t very engaging,” he admits.

But a couple months later, Laflamme met a respected fellow physicist who started telling him about an exciting new institute for theoretical physics in Waterloo. “I thought, wow, he knows about this.”  

Laflamme was looking for a move and could have gone on to any one of a number of great universities. He and his wife had been thinking about settling in Vancouver, where his wife was from. But a subsequent dinner at the farm home of David Johnston, who was then the president of the University of Waterloo and later became a Governor General, convinced them. The dinner, which also included the Lazaridis family, charmed the Laflammes into coming to Waterloo instead.  

Laflamme became a founder of Perimeter Institute and subsequently the founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, which opened in 2002.

Cliff Burgess

Research Associate Faculty, Perimeter Institute, Faculty, McMaster University

Cliff Burgess was a visitor to Perimeter in the early days when it was still in the old post office building. Today, he is a professor who works at the intersection of particle physics and cosmology at McMaster University but is also a research associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute.  

“There was the novelty of the big bar with the chairs where there were discussions. It had the feel of a startup more than a physics institute, which was cool,” he says.

He first heard about Perimeter when he was still at McGill University in Montreal. Burton, the first director, had taken Robert Myers, Maxim Pospelov (a former Perimeter associate faculty member and now a physicist at the University of Minnesota) and Burgess to lunch to inform them about Perimeter’s plans. Burgess admits being skeptical at the time. “The plans sounded amazing but I remember thinking ‘this would be great, but I do not see it happening.’”  

But later, when Myers decided to leave McGill to join Perimeter, “it became more real,” Burgess says.

He recalls how Myers took something of a McGill tradition with him – at McGill, a cross-country ski pole was used as a pointer during physics seminars. At Perimeter, Myers started the tradition of using a hockey stick as a pointer, something that still happens today.

As the new building on Caroline Street opened, on land that was formerly an arena, Burgess returned as a research associate faculty member.  

He remembers the gala for the opening of the new building, which was happening even as the construction was still nearing completion.  

“I remember walking over (at that point the researchers were still mostly in the old post office building waiting for the move into the new building) to see how the preparations for the gala were going. The atrium still looked like a construction site to almost within a few hours of the dinner when the equipment was moved out of the way. So, it was like the scene of an explosion run backward: A big mess going away and revealing the dining room underneath,” he says.

“Needless to say, the gala went flawlessly,” adds Burgess, who credits the skill of Dan Lynch, associate director of Perimeter’s Bistro, for making that happen.

He adds that all the non-academic staff made Perimeter special, and a success.

“Everyone, from the receptionist to the director, talked and behaved as if they were privileged to be part of this amazing opportunity. The Institute was then also much smaller, and so had a very special feel to it. Kind of the ‘if I need to solve X I should just go talk to Y and we will fix it today,’ feel.”

Robert Spekkens

Research Faculty

Having just finished his PhD at the University of Toronto around 2001, Robert Spekkens was wondering if his career trajectory was at a dead end.  

Although he had done work in quantum information, hoping to survive on that, his main research focus was on quantum foundations, a field that didn’t seem to be brimming with job opportunities.

Quantum foundations is a fascinating subject area with more than 100 years of history. It goes back to historical figures like Louis de Broglie who introduced wave particle duality; Werner Heisenberg who developed the framework of quantum mechanics and later introduced the uncertainty principle, and Erwin Schrodinger with his probabilistic wave equation describing how quantum systems evolve over time and who then famously objected to the probabilistic nature of reality with his Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment.

Ever since, theoretical physicists have struggled to understand: Why? Why is the behaviour of particles in the quantum realm so bizarre compared to our everyday reality? What is the true nature of reality? Why does quantum mechanics work the way it does?  

These are the questions people in the field of quantum foundations are still trying to answer. Even as a postdoctoral researcher in 2001, Spekkens wanted to help answer those questions. But few young physicists were being hired to do that. There was more interest in applications of quantum theory for quantum computing, for example.

But Spekkens was lucky. Just as he graduated and was looking for a permanent job, Perimeter Institute was getting off the ground. Here was an institute that was interested in unconventional ideas and was trying to grow its quantum foundations group.

Spekkens was in Toronto when he was introduced to Perimeter by Michele Mosca. He attended a series of seminars at Perimeter, and then ended up taking a postdoctoral position when it was still in the old post office building.

In the summertime, the old building would get hot, so the windows were often open. He remembers squirrels coming in to take some of the nuts that were brought to work by a colleague.

“We were growing,” Spekkens recalls. The cubicle spaces for the postdoctoral researchers kept being subdivided to accommodate more people.  

Spekkens then left to take a three-year Royal Society postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, but he returned to Perimeter in 2008 as a faculty member.

One of the aspects of Perimeter that Spekkens appreciated in the early days was how it was being built with everyone’s involvement.  

“The administration meetings were like faculty meetings and were very inclusive. All the postdoctoral researchers would go to the meetings to hear the updates. We would have these meetings where we would decide how this place was going to be. It was very nice to be part of those conversations,” he says.

When Spekkens looks back and considers what made Perimeter a success, he feels that the fact that Perimeter was willing to invest in unconventional subject areas and ideas was crucial.  

“They set a high bar and they approached it a bit like a startup where we would recruit people on the basis that this place was different.”  

There were many factors that made Perimeter a success, but still, “it is surprising that we managed to pull it off,” he adds.

Spekkens says if it had not been for Perimeter, his own career trajectory certainly might not have evolved as it did. “I certainly owe a lot to Perimeter, to Howard Burton, and to the vision of Mike Lazaridis, who invested in theoretical physics and quantum foundations in particular.”

Carlo Rovelli

Distinguished Visiting Research Chair, Perimeter Institute, Adjunct Professor, Western University, Professeur de classe exceptionnelle, Aix-Marseille University, France

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist known worldwide for his books that beautifully explain concepts in modern physics to the public at large, says he was introduced to Perimeter before it even existed.  

A time before the timeline began. Which seems appropriate for someone who works in the field of quantum gravity to understand what spacetime is made of in the quantum realm.  

Today, Rovelli is an extremely prolific communicator of the great science ideas for the general public. His popular books include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics; The Order of Time; Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity; Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution; and his most recent book, White Holes.

Back in the 1980s, Rovelli had worked with Lee Smolin, who, a couple decades later, would become one of the first Perimeter faculty members. They, along with other colleagues, co-founded loop quantum gravity theory, which is part of the decades-long quest to bridge quantum theory with Einstein’s relativity theory.

Not surprisingly, Rovelli got a phone call from Howard Burton, just as Perimeter was starting to get off the ground.

Burton told him about a Canadian entrepreneur named Mike Lazaridis, who wanted to start an institute for theoretical physics. “I thought, ‘wow, wonderful – a visionary entrepreneur who wants to invest in pure research. How can I help?’”

Burton wanted him to join the faculty, but Rovelli already had a position with which he was happy (at the time he was part of the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh).  

But he did visit Perimeter when it was just starting out in the old post office building, and after that, he became a regular visitor. Today, he is still coming to Perimeter on a regular basis as a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair. He just recently gave the first of Perimeter’s public lectures for it’s 25th anniversary celebration.

Along with Lazaridis and Burton, he credits Smolin for being “the ideological force” behind Perimeter. “Without Lee Smolin, Perimeter would not have become what it became. He was full of passion.”

”To me it was absolutely marvellous,” he says of seeing Perimeter in its early days. “It was creating a space for the mind, being free and not controlled by powerful universities. It was giving a lot of the power to young people, the postdoctoral researchers, who were deciding, as much as anyone else, what it would become,” Rovelli says.

“What I remember are the endless discussions, just talking and talking, and talking. Some of my ideas came from that, from those long conversations,” he adds. “It reminded me of the spirit of great institutes in the history of science, where people would get together because they just wanted to know. Just because they were curious.”

This is part two in a series celebrating Perimeter’s history for the Institute’s 25th anniversary celebrations. In part 3, we follow along as the Institute explodes from an unlikely startup to a rock-star establishment stepping out onto the world stage. You can find part 1 here.