Michael Borinsky: Seeking hidden realities behind nature’s beauty

Michael Borinksy appreciates the simple colourful beauty of a rainbow. But his appreciation doesn’t stop there. 

“You really want to know how the raindrops do it,” he says. “How they make these beautiful patterns.”

It’s always been this way for Borinsky; his admiration of something (anything) is quickly complemented by his curiosity about how it works. 

He remembers first seeing Einstein’s famous E = mc² equation. He didn’t understand it at the time, but he was fascinated by the notion that such a small collection of letters and numbers could signify so much about the universe. 

“I have to know more about this,” Borinsky recalls thinking at the time. “This is really interesting. Why is not everyone talking about this all the time?”

That thought carried him through high school, where he specialized in both physics and mathematics, and into university in Berlin. He dove into quantum mechanics and was spellbound. Every counter-intuitive aspect of quantum science piqued his curiosity, every apparent paradox demanded an explanation. 

“It left open so many questions,” recalls Borinsky, who joined Perimeter Institute’s faculty in 2025. 

When he was still finding his path in physics, an internship at CERN in Switzerland brought him face-to-face with particle physics at a pivotal moment. The Higgs boson had just been discovered (a discovery that would win the Nobel Prize), and researchers were trying to understand what it all meant for our picture of reality.

Borinsky was fascinated both by the experiment, and the intriguing quantum language underlying it. Particle interactions are described using quantum field theory, a framework that blends physics and deep mathematics in intricate ways. 

“This language is so complicated and not so well understood mathematically,” he says, but amid the language there are “fascinating mathematical structures just popping up.”

So Borinsky’s research is focused on mathematical physics, the borderland where abstract mathematics must meet the empirical demands of real-life observation and experiment. 

Borinsky says he’s “more on the mathematical side” of mathematical physics, but the line between disciplines gets fuzzy quickly when he and colleagues explore big, fundamental questions. For him, Perimeter is a place to get out of his own bubble and explore ideas with colleagues tackling similar questions from different angles. “That’s the really fantastic thing about the job,” he says. 

In some of his research, Borinsky is trying to make quantum field theory more usable. In principle, physicists understand how subatomic particles behave. In practice, the equations that describe them are so complex that extracting precise predictions requires enormous computing power.

“We need huge computers to make these predictions,” he says.  

In some of his recent work, he explores a new framework that re-formulates parts of quantum field theory in a way that makes intricate calculations more tractable. The aim is ultimately to improve how predictions are made, potentially leading to clearer results about how particles behave.

“This framework helps simplify complex integrals in a way that aligns better with computational methods,” he explains.

That work in particular acts as a bridge between deep mathematical structure and concrete physical application. Borinsky also works in the opposite direction: using physical intuition to illuminate longstanding problems in pure mathematics. With collaborators, he has published research on combinatorial structures — essentially counting questions rooted in mathematics and applied to quantum particle interactions. 

He describes this as creating “artificial alternative universes,” where particles take the place of mathematical structures, allowing insight to flow from physical intuition back to pure geometry.

“It’s like making a model universe where you can test patterns and then apply what you learn back to the original problems,” he says.

When not decoding the quantum realm, Borinsky finds balance in nature. He hikes, he bikes, he canoes in the Canadian wilderness. Sometimes he ponders what he calls a “utopian vision” for science — a future in which discovery isn’t limited to experts, but accessible and understandable to people of all ages and backgrounds.

“I’m hoping that there’s going to be a time when everyone can have scientific, mathematical, theoretical physics experiences (and) positive experiences of discovery.”

And sometimes, when adventuring in nature, Borinsky sees a rainbow, and it sparks the same awe and curiosity that led him to science as a child.