Theoretical Physics: What is it Good For? Absolutely Everything!

Many people think of theoretical physics as too deep, mysterious, and abstract for real-world problems, but theoretical physicists who graduated from Perimeter Institute have found career opportunities not just in the halls of academia but also in startups and long-established companies around the world.  

Recently, as part of Perimeter Institute’s 25th anniversary celebrations, Communitech, which is a globally recognized technology hub that supports the technology company ecosystem in Waterloo Region, hosted a breakfast “fireside chat” event featuring alumni who got their masters or doctorates in theoretical physics while at Perimeter, then went on to amazing careers, in everything from lunar landers to video game development.

The fireside chat was moderated by Emily Petroff, Director, External Relations at Perimeter Institute, and featured Brigette Oakes, VP of Engineering at Firefly Aerospace and David Louapre, AI scientist at Hugging Face, a platform that enables collaboration amongst the machine learning community. David is also creator of the French educational YouTube channel Science Étonnante which has over a million subscribers, and was formerly the scientific director at Ubisoft, one of the biggest video game companies in the world.  

Louapre got his PhD in the field of quantum gravity while at Perimeter in 2004, not long after Perimeter was launched. 

Oakes got her master’s degree in physics while at Perimeter in 2012, and then went on to do a PhD in engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. She has worked at various space-related technology companies and is currently at Firefly Aerospace, a company that isn’t just launching rockets: it has various teams working on a class of lunar landers called Blue Ghost, the first of which landed on the Moon in early 2025. They also design reusable rockets and the robotics systems that will explore the Moon.  

Oakes said that in all the private sector companies she has worked for, physics has been a critical component. “It has been about taking the physics into software models that I can scale,” she said.  

But more importantly, physics taught her to “think like a scientist,” allowing her to tackle even the hardest problems. She has enjoyed switching between academia and industry, hardware and software, and finding new opportunities to work on the hardest problems along the way. 

“When I'm speaking to a lot of physicists and engineers, that is just part of their DNA — to constantly problem-solve. There is just a curiosity that you can’t let go of, even when you go home,” she said. Remote landing a spacecraft on the Moon is one hard problem she is deeply familiar with, where there are complex variables that you can’t always account for ahead of time. 

She explained that while the engineers and physicists on Earth have a map of the lunar terrain, it’s difficult to know the exact conditions they will be dealing with until the craft gets close to the landing site. Moreover, the closer the craft gets to landing, the more dust gets kicked up, which can affect the spacecraft’s visual systems. That’s the type of problem the team needs to be able to solve on the fly using their visual navigation systems and machine learning. 

When handed a seemingly impossible problem, it is curiosity and the strong in-built desire to solve the problem that drives physicists and engineers to continually look for new approaches and “ask 100 questions” to get to the right solution, she said. 

Louapre’s physics training, meanwhile, led him into the world of artificial intelligence. One of the first private sector companies he worked for used machine learning to solve real world industrial challenges, long before machine learning became ubiquitous. Currently, at Hugging Face, he is working in the area machine learning and artificial intelligence using open source large language models. 

In the gaming industry, his physics training gave him the skills needed to use artificial intelligence to create reactive, context-aware, emotionally believable gaming characters. 

“There are a lot of similarities between game design and science,” Louapre said, explaining that gamers are exposed to problems that they must solve very quickly at each stage of the game. The gaming industry needs to create models for them that will behave as systems would behave and react in the real world. 

But beyond the problem-solving aspects, Louapre is most passionate about the transmission of science concepts to the public. Even though he didn’t go into academia, he has been able to channel his theoretical physics knowledge into his YouTube channel, Science Étonnante, which has French-speaking subscribers from many parts of the world. 

Ultimately, being a physicist is still core to his being, Louapre said. “I have always kept this habit of introducing myself as a physicist. This is deep, deep in my identity.” 

You can read more about Oakes, Louapre, and many other PI alumni and their unique journeys after grad school here.

You can also read Communitech's write-up of this event here.