First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute

Howard Burton

• Editorial: Open Agenda Publishing Inc.
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701365
• Categoría: Scienze fisiche
• Categoría: Fisica

In this second edition of First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute, Howard Burton tells the remarkable and unconventional story—with a bold and biting humour and surprising candour—of the founding of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Howard was the Founding Director of Perimeter Institute and his experiences at developing the research and outreach mandates of PI are described in this thought-provoking book featuring a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose.How was PI created from scratch, from first principles? What were the hurdles? What were the challenges? What was the ''Howard and Mike show'' all about and what did BlackBerrys and RIM have to do with PI? In vivid and compelling detail, Howard describes his remarkable odyssey of partnering with BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis to develop a pioneering new theoretical physics institute entirely from scratch.

1. Origins

Without warning, the car lurched across a lane and a half of traffic and I instinctively clutched the rear door handle in a vain attempt to steady myself. Outside the drizzle had turned to freezing rain and cars around us were slipping and sliding all across the highway, but my driver, babbling away on his wireless headset in some unknown tongue (Hindi? Swahili?), seemed oblivious to everything except his conversation, gesturing passionately to make his point to his invisible companion as we careered towards the Toronto airport.

Best not to look. I brought out my BlackBerry and tried to distract myself by reviewing recent messages, glancing at the ribbons of text as I held the rock-like gadget in my palm like some sort of secret talisman, trying to calm myself. Still, the mind wanders: What would my epitaph look like? I wondered. “Physicist dies in car crash on his way to start institute”?

It was February 2000 and I was on my way to Princeton to visit the Institute for Advanced Study and talk to some of the greatest minds alive about starting a research institute in Waterloo, Ontario. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering how on earth I had gotten myself into this situation.

The very fact that I had a job at all was a rather unexpected development. Unlike most of my acquaintances growing up in suburban Toronto, who seemed to have a fairly steady handle on how to proceed through the gates of life’s unyielding algorithm—school, university, job, marriage, children, midlife crisis, reconciliation, death—I never quite got the hang of the point of it all and couldn’t imagine what sort of regular employment would be sufficiently interesting and rewarding to devote the better part of one’s life to. And the notion of having a boss—someone who would unhesitatingly tell you how to spend countless hours by sheer virtue of his or her position—struck me as little less than glorified slavery. Even the prestigious jobs that many in my orbit regarded as the acme of achievement, such as bank president or brain surgeon, seemed to me rather boring and quite definitely not worth the sacrifice of time. After all, life was too short.

Of course, this is by no means a strikingly unusual view for a young man to take. The young, filled with a combination of rebelliousness, naiveté and a disproportionate sense of their own uniqueness, have been railing against the stultification of the established order for millennia; so in the overall scheme of things it is hardly shocking that someone raised in the cradle of suburbia should veer away from the twin perils of law and dentistry and direct his efforts towards less practical pursuits.

In my case, I naturally drifted towards physics. My interest in physics started in high school when I recognized that it was the only course in which one didn’t have to memorize things: anyone could walk into a test with only a few general principles and derive whatever was needed to solve the problems at hand. It wasn’t that I was particularly bad at memorizing, it’s just that memorizing required work and I was forever looking for the easiest way out. In biology you had to learn a lot of things; in physics, on the other hand, you just had to learn a few ideas. Of course, the fact that the proto-accountants who surrounded me were continually bemoaning how difficult physics was added considerably to its appeal. There was another factor that helped too—my high-school physics teacher. Mr. Salsbury was a fairly crotchety fellow (as high-school physics teachers tend to be): an intimidating sort with a shock of white hair and a frequent scowl, who took evident delight in watching his students squirm under his steely glare. On one particular occasion we were doing an experiment to repeat Johannes Kepler’s seminal work on the orbit of Mars—plotting its trajectory on paper using the same 400-year-old data of Tycho Brahe that Kepler had used. In fact, Mr. Salsbury, crafty fellow that he was, had done much more than that: determined to tangibly demonstrate to us the pitfalls of clinging too strongly to an unjustifiable theoretical framework, we were instructed to plot a circular orbit—Kepler’s initial assumption, in keeping with the unquestioned consensus of his contemporary scientific colleagues.

What we didn’t know at the time, was that this was impossible: the orbit of Mars, like all planetary orbits, isn’t, in fact, circular at all, but rather, elliptical. It was Kepler, after seven painstaking years of dedicated effort, who eventually recognized this, giving birth to the modern age of astronomy and setting the stage for Newton to illustrate precisely why, under his universal law of gravitation, all such orbits would necessarily be elliptical.

Of course a circle is just a special case of an ellipse. That the ancient Greeks insisted upon circular paths for aesthetic reasons—unhesitatingly concluding that perfect circles are the only acceptable expressions of heavenly trajectories—is well known, but what is often underappreciated is that, for all the planets we can see with the naked eye, this is also a pretty darned good approximation and a clear reason why that particular bias stood up for millennia.

So when I was asked to demonstrate the circularity of the orbit of Mars, I naturally had little difficulty in producing the desired result. Most of the points lay close enough to a circle, and with a bit of jiggling around of a few others it was not difficult to finish the task at hand. There was probably more than enough experimental error somewhere in the 400-year old data.

When Mr. Salsbury saw my paper he swooped down upon me like a falcon on his prey, snatched the plot out of my hands and held it aloft for the entire class to see. Unbeknownst to me, I had waltzed right into his trap. Smiling mischievously, he boomed in his most stentorian voice: “Burton! You’ve cooked your data!” My face grew flushed and I remember thinking that anyone who could spot a faker that quickly was deserving of respect. I also remember thinking that if I continued in physics, I’d better focus on theory rather than experiment. The real world had this alarming tendency not to conform to a perfectly reasonable theoretical framework.

As I moved through university, I began to appreciate that the mathematical coherence of physics that had so appealed to my high-school laziness was an essential characteristic of the field, inextricably tied to its celebrated power and elegance that has captivated some of the most accomplished minds of history, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. Mankind’s search to understand the world around us has not only led to a stunning array of useful devices that have changed the way we live, but also stands as nothing less than one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements, every bit as beautiful and ennobling as the most celebrated works of art or music. To understand the building blocks of matter or the structure of space and time is a truly spectacular accomplishment. That such knowledge so often ends up being of incalculable practical benefit as well only sweetens the pie.

All in all pretty heady stuff and the perfect tonic for a young man desperate to avoid going to law school. But that was only the beginning: the wonderful thing about university is that the intellectual world seems to veritably explode before your very eyes. Soon there were countless opportunities to dip one’s toes into the great rivers of knowledge and explore issues the greatest minds had wrestled with from time immemorial: What is truth? How should we structure a society? What is consciousness? What is the world made of?

The not so wonderful thing about university is that it compartmentalizes this knowledge into largely non-overlapping faculties, departments and courses—a dry, befuddling and often arbitrary process that frequently impedes a richer, more comprehensive understanding of profound issues. Of course, this is done largely for efficiency’s sake: there is much to learn and only a certain number of years to absorb the basic material. Nobody would reasonably suggest, say, replacing an undergraduate mathematics course in differential equations with one on Aristotelian ethics or Renaissance art.

But it’s quite another thing to suggest that aspiring physicists would concretely benefit by exposing themselves to Gottfried Leibniz and Ernst Mach, say, so as to better understand the key issues that Einstein was addressing when he developed the general theory of relativity. Unfortunately, few do.

And then there is the other direction: most non-science students are sorely ignorant of scientific accomplishments and methodology. Imagine, if you will, a university graduate from any English-speaking university who can’t name at least two or three of the plays of Shakespeare: such a demonstration of ignorance would quickly result in unstinting condemnation of the student and woeful hand-wringing about falling educational standards. Now imagine a typical humanities student being asked to cite at least one of Newton’s Laws of Motion, the seventeenth-century bedrock of our modern age and a rough scientific equivalent to having heard of the existence of Hamlet. In an alarmingly high number of cases, a quick apologetic shuffling of the feet followed by “I dropped physics in high school” will normally serve as ample justification of his ignorance. It is not so much the specific content, per se, as the methodology. Familiarity with the specifics of Newton’s Laws probably won’t directly impinge on one’s day to day existence any more than familiarity with the any of the particular lines of Macbeth, but both provide a vital conceptual framework to comprehend the world around us. The vast majority of humanities students complete an entire advanced education without any real exposure to scientific thinking—the best that one can hope for is for the aspiring English major to stumble across the odd “science for poets” course to fulfill a stray elective. In an age when so many of our key political decisions are scientifically related (stem cell research, climate change, nuclear power), the lack of broad-based technical understanding amongst our policy makers, who almost exclusively come from the humanities or social sciences, is particularly concerning and is only further exacerbated by this widespread resonance of ignorance amongst the general public.

In my case, the core issue that set me on my personal ping-pong match between the sciences and the humanities was my encounter with quantum mechanics. Physics, you understand, is not typically a field loaded with potential for fame, fortune or even moderate social opportunities—as such, it tends to attract a category of person for whom such issues are not principal driving factors. But the one thing most physicists take considerable pride in is its no-nonsense intellectual bedrock. Chemistry, we say with a patronizing lilt, is merely applied physics, while biology is applied chemistry. When a doctor tells you that your likelihood of getting a disease is raised or lowered by some percentage as a result of some particular action, we shake our heads sadly and reflect that they only have the foggiest picture of what is really going on. In physics, you see, we know. For while a biologist’s models will reduce at some level to chemistry, and a chemist’s will in turn reduce to physics, a physicist should be able to give you the straight goods at the end of the day or else straightforwardly admit her current ignorance. To a physicist there is no possibility of putting off difficult questions by appealing to some other underlying model or framework—it is, quite simply, our business to find out what that framework is. In this way, physics is naturally the “queen of the sciences,” occupied with providing the ultimate foundational understanding of the laws of nature and thus standing at the base of the entire scientific enterprise. The only people who dare to challenge the supremacy of the physicists in this reductionist landscape are the pure mathematicians, but with their peculiar metaphysical tendencies and perverse determination to manipulate symbols independent of the world around them, they are too far gone to recognize that much of what they do is simply irrelevant and that the only real point of mathematics is to be a tool for us physicists. Such, at any rate, is the physics culture that one is indoctrinated with, subtly and not so subtly, from the early undergraduate years onwards.

So imagine my surprise and disappointment when I finally began to study the famous theory of quantum mechanics I had heard so much about—the one that even the mighty Einstein couldn’t come to terms with because of its seemingly bizarre intrinsic statistical nature (“God does not play dice” and all of that)—and was presented with nothing more than a series of curious mathematical rules to manipulate often strikingly ill-defined terms. So much for “the buck stops here/we’re the reality guys” swaggering spirit I had known and loved.

Particles, I was told, had a wave-like aspect associated with them, from which we could calculate probabilities that were overwhelmingly accurate predictions of microscopic behaviour. Great. But what was this wave function really? Did it exist or was it just some sort of magical calculational device? Perhaps it just reflected how much we happened to know. If it was real, where was it? And if it wasn’t real, what was going on—how did it work? And then there was the act of making a measurement itself. In the classical world, making a measurement was no big deal—you could watch something happen or not, and it either happened or it didn’t. In the quantum world, on the other hand, making a measurement was a very big deal: by measuring a quantum system, according to the theory, you were profoundly affecting the wave function that described the system. But how? And what did it mean to make a measurement? What constitutes a measurement, exactly? Why do only classical objects (like lab technicians) seem capable of making quantum measurements? And anyway, aren’t they also made up of quantum particles? How does that work, precisely? What on earth was going on?

Today, these perplexing concerns are often at least tangentially addressed in the undergraduate physics curriculum, sometimes in coordination with courses devoted to the burgeoning field of quantum information theory. But in the mid-1980s, most physics departments simply weren’t recognizing these issues at all, leaving the frustrated undergraduate to simply stew and become all the more frustrated. It was like a gigantic cover-up: anyone asking a professor a question about the foundations of quantum theory was likely to be stonily informed that quantum mechanics was the most tested and successful theory that ever existed and that was that. Your job as a physicist was to adeptly manipulate the symbols of this rather odd chess game. If you stubbornly persisted in your line of questioning (“Fine, but what does it all mean?”), you were more often than not coldly directed to the philosophy department for further inquiries. So off I went.

In the land of philosophy, things were radically different, and my first impressions were ones of unbounded delight. There I found a veritable treasure trove of activity: pointed debates on foundations of quantum theory and illuminating discussions on many substantive issues. I also had the chance to read original papers by the greats of twentieth-century physics. In a typical physics class, historical missteps, confrontations, and troublesome hypotheses are airbrushed away as students are taught the finished theory as some sort of monolithic, unquestioned whole, a complete package that somehow sprung fully formed into existence, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Going back to the original sources—reading the likes of Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg—not only palpably demonstrates that this is not so (and goes a considerable way towards reassuring the anxious student who is frustrated that he cannot immediately grasp all the subtleties of the formalism), it is also one of the most effective ways to highlight the conceptual confusion and ambiguities that still beset the theory, many of which have been swept under the rug for decades.

The cultural divide between physics and philosophy was different in other ways as well. In a typical physics seminar, it is not at all uncommon for a disenchanted audience member to pop up from his chair and protest that the speaker must be dead wrong because he hasn’t taken into account some issue or has forgotten about some effect. If the issue is deemed sufficiently serious, the speaker must be prepared to respond on the spot, often with detailed calculations to prove his point.

In a philosophy seminar, on the other hand, things a...