Creating Another Einstein

What would it take to produce another Einstein? That is a question that returns with cyclical regularity in the physics community. But there is no need for the world to wait for someone of Albert Einstein’s remarkable vision and achievement to just happen along, not when we have got an Einstein factory right here in Canada.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo is Canada’s premier hothouse for nurturing the best and brightest physicists from around the world in pursuit of the elusive answers to the Big Questions of the universe. Although Einstein is not actually mentioned in the mission statement of the Perimeter Institute, the place was set up for precisely the kind of dramatic scientific breakthroughs that have made him such an icon.

The institute did not, of course, spring into existence fully formed. It was born in the fall of 1999, the child of Mike Lazaridis, a wealthy Waterloo entrepreneur with a passion for Big Science, and...