Subject Grouping: Praxis

I started a company, Research In Motion, while I was still at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. By the late 1990s we had developed the BlackBerry handheld mobile device. As a result I found myself in a position where I could invest in an area that I am passionate about and one that could make a big difference.

Spot an opportunity. Having observed that research funding is usually thinly spread, I decided to start a theoretical-physics institute that would focus on science that is fundamental to all human progress and at which Canada can excel.

Promote scientific openness. My driving motivation for establishing the Perimeter Institute (PI), located next to the University of Waterloo, is that I feel fundamental science needs more support. What worries me is that governments all around the world seem to be listening to the same consultant. They ask scientists to do something that will benefit the economy within five years. Of course, governments are under pressure to balance budgets and be accountable – that’s reasonable. But some of that pressure is getting transferred to universities, with unfortunate results.

Science is a global enterprise based on co-operation and openness. If you say to universities that they must justify their research with patents and licences, you collapse that openness. Efforts to commercialize too early are making researchers more secretive, hampering their ability to excel, without necessarily helping business. I wanted to challenge this trend.

Concentrate on core competencies. A strategic decision we made when creating the Institute in 1999 was to focus on a couple of very specialized fields, quantum gravity and quantum foundations, because we felt these were areas where a relatively small, high-quality team could make a big difference. This is the same strategy that originally made BlackBerry a success: it focused on doing one thing – “push e-mail” – very well rather than competing on all features. So for the first few years, PI focused on recruiting top-class researchers in these two areas to ensure that research efforts were of international calibre within a relatively short period. As the Institute’s reputation builds, we are branching out a bit more.

Build a focal point. The other decision we made early on was to house the Institute in an outstanding building. Before we built it, we spent two years going around the world and talking to people in theoretical-physics institutes and theory departments at universities, asking them what works and what doesn’t. Based on this, we put together some specifications and organized a competition, where we really let the architects go wild. The result is a building with a design that has won several prizes and is internationally recognized.

Attract investment. I invested C$100 million of my own money in PI to get it started. For the longer term it was critical to get government support. Convincing government officials took a huge effort. Part of the challenge is that not many politicians understand basic science, let alone know how to value it. This means that a lot of funding is done almost entirely on your ability to explain the benefits and on their faith in you. Early on, all levels of government (local, provincial and federal) saw the benefit of PI and decided to support the Institute with a total of about C$55 million dollars. More recently, and now that the Institute is established, a further C$50 million in public investment was warmly received.

Present your product. In the long run, you can’t rely on faith alone. So although excellent science is crucial to success that’s really only half of the story. The other half of the Institute’s activities is about outreach. For example, PI has a summer-school programme for students from all over Canada and around the world. PI also goes on tour across Canada to give classroom instruction about physics to both students and teachers.

PI also has a programme of monthly public lectures. Sometimes we’ll have scientists like Roger Penrose discuss a weighty topic; other times we’ll have debates about science with well-known historians and journalists. Waterloo has a population of only about 100,000, yet every month we fill a 550 seat lecture theatre, and there’s always a queue outside on standby. That’s how much interest you can generate in science, if you make the effort to open it up for people and make the research accessible.

And that’s success. Because ultimately, these are the people who vote for the governments which fund the research. If they don’t benefit from and believe in what we’re doing, it’s always going to be an uphill struggle. So in addition to directly helping students, teachers and members of the general public, there’s reason for balancing good science with good outreach. We have to move beyond relying on faith.

Mike Lazaridis is founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry handheld devices, as well as chancellor of the University of Waterloo. Additional information about PI is available at
www.perimeterinstitute.ca.

Nuclear science is undergoing a renaissance as it confronts new and previously unapproachable research opportunities. One such opportunity, the study of short-lived nuclei far from stability, is emerging as a major frontier in nuclear science. Rare-isotope research is tied to astrophysics and mesoscopic science, fields in which voracious demand for new data is generating worldwide interest in high-power, next-generation accelerators.

New facilities will probe the limits of nuclear stability and determine nuclear properties in uncharted regions of nuclei with unusual proton-to-neutron ratios. The new data will challenge descriptions of nuclei that are based on data limited to nuclei near the valley of nuclear stability. These improved models of nuclei – two component, open mesoscopic systems – will increase our understanding of mesoscopic systems in fields such as chemistry, biology, nanoscience and quantum information. More directly, the models will greatly boost our understanding of the cosmos.

Today, our descriptions of stellar evolution, and especially of explosive events, such as X-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, thermonuclear (Type Ia) supernovae and novae, are limited by inadequate knowledge of important nuclear properties. We need new data for nuclei far from stability and better nuclear theories to develop accurate models of these astrophysical phenomena. Improved models, in turn, will help astrophysicists make better use of data from ground- and space-based observatories, understand the nuclear processes that produce the elements observed in the cosmos and learn about the environments in which they were formed.

We already have the first concrete evidence that nuclear structure, well established for nuclei near the line of stability, can change dramatically as we move away from the line of stability. The effective interactions far from stability – pairing, proton–neutron, spin-orbit and tensor – are different, but largely unknown. We need quantitative experimental information to refine theoretical treatments that describe these exotic isotopes.
There are several particularly promising research directions. For example, nuclei with unusual density distributions have been discovered for the lighter elements, but little is known about the properties of heavier, very neutron-rich nuclei. These heavier nuclei may have multi-neutron halo distributions with unusual cluster or molecular structures, which otherwise only occur at the surface of neutron stars. Such nuclei provide a unique opportunity to study the nucleon–nucleon interaction in early pure neutron matter.

Intense beams of neutron-rich isotopes will be used to synthesize transactinide nuclei that are more neutron-rich than is possible with stable beams. These nuclei are predicted to be sufficiently strongly bound and long-lived for detailed chemical study.

Energetic nucleus–nucleus collision experiments with beams of very neutron-rich and very neutron-poor isotopes will explore the asymmetry energy term in the equation of state of neutron-rich nuclear matter. This term is important in understanding the properties of neutron stars.

Nuclei are self-sustaining finite droplets of a two-component – neutron and proton – Fermi-liquid. Selectively prepared nuclei will allow us to study, on a femtoscopic scale, typical mesoscopic phenomena: self-organization and complexity arising from elementary interactions, symmetry and phase transformations, coexistence of quantum chaos and collective dynamics. The openness of loosely bound nuclei owing to strong coupling to the continuum allows us to probe general mesoscopic concepts, such as information processing and decoherence, which are key ideas in quantum computing.

The interplay of strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions determine detailed nuclear properties. Selecting nuclear systems that isolate or amplify the specific physics of interest will allow better tests of fundamental symmetries and fuel the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Beyond advancing basic research questions, new accelerators should yield practical benefits for science and society. In fact, nuclear science has a long record of such applications. Technologies rooted in nuclear science – such as positron-emission tomography, the use of radioactive isotopes for treating or diagnosing disease, and more recently, the use of dedicated accelerators for treating cancer patients – have transformed medicine. Sterilization of fresh produce or surgical instruments with ionizing radiation is growing in importance. Ultra-sensitive nuclear detection, such as Rutherford backscattering, proton-induced X- and gamma-ray emission and accelerator mass spectrometry, has provided diagnostic tools for archaeology and material science.

Next-generation rare-isotope research and this tradition of applied work promise new opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration on national and international security, biomedicine, materials research and nuclear energy. Nuclear science is well positioned to deliver new benefits to physics and society in the coming decades.