The Omniscient Mussel

Perimeter Institute: Quantum 2 Cosmos Festival

Waterloo, Ontario – one half of the Kitchener-Waterloo partnership affectionate known by the cool kids as the Kdub – is a community of roughly 110,000 people in Southwestern Ontario. 90 minutes west of Toronto and smack dab in the middle of the Golden Triangle, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to expect a sleepy, suburban community with one or two things that are of mild interest to visitors.

So how then, did it get voted the world’s most intelligent community in 2007? Miss Mussel can’t take all the credit, particularly since she doesn’t live there. Instead the kudos go to the city’s two universities and places like the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

PI is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and is marking the occasion with a festival of knowledge called Quantum 2 Cosmos. The idea of the Institute is to create a place where great minds can come and think about great problems without the burden of an academic teaching load.

PI was created by RIM founder Mike Lazaridis with his own money and the general idea is to be to create a Google-like atmosphere where fellows are free to do what they like, when they feel the need. While she hasn’t explored the inner recesses of the space, there doesn’t seem to be slides anywhere. A pool table, on site gym and equation-filled chalkboards in every lounge do hint at the vibe however.

One of the things the PI has been particularly good at is making the space as welcoming to the arts as it is to science. The Institute is host to an international concert series that brings classical musicians to town who would otherwise not stop in such a small place. The concerts do tend to be sold out at all times, with last year’s season ticket holders snaffling up all the seats for the upcoming year but that is mostly a function of the small performance space.

The Q2C Festival does have some art bits but it is mostly a series of lectures on various topics relating to “the meaning of things” for lack of a better umbrella. PI does lectures throughout the year on arts and science subjects geared for the general audience and these are no different. What makes them relevant to the wider world is that the Q2C lecture are available online for viewing either live or at your leisure from the archive.

Some highlights include:

Quantum 2 Cosomos – 9 physicists talk about what’s around the corner

The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time – the nature of time, the origin of entropy, and how what happened before the Big Bang may be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today.

Life, the Universe and Nothing: Life, and Science, in an Ever Expanding Universe = Can life be eternal in an eternally expanding universe,? Are the laws of physics tailored for the existence of life? What will science in the far future tell us about the universe?

Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight – Cory Doctorow – lecture is Thursday at 4pm.

Mathematical Art and Artistic Mathematicians – lecture is Saturday at 1pm