ORGANIZATION
Perimeter Institute
The theoretical physics research institute in Waterloo, Ontario, co-founded in 1999 and partially funded by BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis — the institutional home of Smolin's work on time, cosmology, and the evolution of physical law.
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent research center in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, dedicated to foundational theoretical physics. Founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis — co-founder of Research In Motion (BlackBerry) — with an initial commitment of C$100 million, the institute was designed as a space where the most fundamental questions in physics could be pursued without the disciplinary pressures that tend to narrow research at conventional universities. Smolin was a founding faculty member and has been one of the institute's most publicly visible researchers, known particularly for his work on loop quantum gravity, cosmological natural selection, and the reality of time. The institute has become a significant center for quantum gravity research, quantum information, cosmology, and foundations of quantum mechanics — the domains where Smolin's most consequential work has been produced.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Perimeter Institute was founded on a specific theoretical bet: that foundational physics had become stagnant at