Conversations at the Perimeter

Shohini Ghose on revolutions – quantum and social

Shohini Ghose is a professor of quantum science at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is also the founder and director of Laurier’s Centre for Women in Science (WinS) and an NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering. In this episode, she takes Lauren and Colin on a journey into the subatomic realm to explore concepts like entanglement, superposition, and her personal favourite quantum quandary: uncertainty. She explains how ideas in quantum science can translate to questions of identity, and how that drives her efforts to improve equity and diversity in science. She also thoughtfully answers questions submitted by elementary school students, and provides a sneak peek into the topics of her upcoming book. Learn more about the her work in equity and diversity with these online resources from WinS: laurierwins.medium.com. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Pedro Vieira on a theory of all quantum field theories

Pedro Vieira is a faculty member at Perimeter Institute, where he holds the Clay Riddell Paul Dirac Chair in Theoretical Physics. In this episode, he tells Lauren and Colin about his work on a kind of uber-theory that encompasses all quantum field theories, as well as what separates the easy and hard problems in this field. It’s a complicated topic to be sure, but Vieira is a master of explaining complex topics with relatable examples and anecdotes – something Lauren discovered as a student when she took a course he taught. “Pedro takes some of those same concepts from graduate courses, but he paints some amazing non-technical pictures for us,” says Lauren. “No mathematical background required!” He explains why the universe might be a hologram and why, from a theoretical physics perspective, a messy bedroom can be a good thing. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Ganapathy Baskaran on physics, biology, and global science

Ganapathy Baskaran is an acclaimed physicist known for his foundational contributions to condensed matter physics, strongly correlated quantum materials, and high-temperature superconductivity. He is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter. He is also a masterful storyteller who, in this episode, tells Lauren and Colin about his upbringing in India, the people who inspire him, and his time in the developing world. Baskaran reflects on a lifetime of exploring some of nature’s most fundamental mysteries, and discusses the similarities and differences that he sees between condensed matter physics and biology. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Nicole Yunger Halpern on quantum steampunk

Nicole Yunger Halpern reenvisions 19th-century thermodynamics for the 21st century, using the mathematical toolkit of quantum information theory. She is a fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. She is also the author of Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow, a book that blends the topic of quantum thermodynamics with the steampunk genre of art and literature, juxtaposing a Victorian aesthetic with futuristic technologies. She tells co-hosts Lauren and Colin about the inspirations behind her work – scientific and artistic – and explains how fundamental ideas in quantum information theory are reshaping science and technology. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Dustin Lang on big data from a big universe

Dustin Lang is a computational scientist at Perimeter Institute who develops techniques for finding needles in the cosmic haystack. He works on several large sky survey projects, tackling the statistical data analysis required to discern meaningful insights from huge datasets gathered by telescopes. In this conversation with Lauren and Colin, he shares his experiences mapping galaxies with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), and hunting for mysterious fast radio bursts (FRBs) with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). He explains how he and his colleagues employ software solutions to expand capabilities of hardware telescopes, the challenges he has encountered in radio versus optical astronomy, and the important role of chicken wire at CHIME. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Savas Dimopoulos on the universe’s biggest unsolved puzzles

Savas Dimopoulos is an influential particle physicist based at Stanford University, who also holds the Coril Holdings Archimedes Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute. He worked at CERN during the 1990s, and was featured in Particle Fever, a 2013 documentary about the hunt for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. In this episode, he talks with Lauren and Colin about how he approaches the grand, open questions that keep him up at night – including two particularly fundamental questions about the universe that he feels still need explaining. Dimopoulos also discusses how particle physics and collider experiments have evolved throughout his career, what motivated him to become a physicist, and why he has never looked back. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Lee Smolin on a lifetime of big questions

Lee Smolin is a founding faculty member at Perimeter Institute and one of the world’s best-known voices in theoretical physics. He is a co-founder of loop quantum gravity, together with Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli. Smolin is also the author of numerous popular science books, including The Trouble with Physics, The Life of the Cosmos, and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. In this conversation with Lauren and Colin, Smolin shares his philosophical outlook on quantum mechanics and argues that it is not a final theory, but rather points us in the direction of a new understanding of nature. He also discusses what motivates his popular writing, his challenges with Parkinson’s disease, and how that struggle has shaped his perspectives in recent years. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Jessie Muir on the mystery of dark energy

The universe is expanding faster and faster all the time, and Jessie Muir wants to understand why. Muir is a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter Institute and a member of the international Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. She co-leads the DES analysis team that seeks to understand the mysterious dark energy driving the universe's accelerating expansion by analyzing galaxy clustering and weak lensing. In this episode, she chats with Lauren and Colin about her work at the intersection of theory and experiment – and how drawing science-themed cartoons helps her grasp and share complex topics in captivating, accessible ways. View the episode transcript here.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Raymond Laflamme on the life-changing power of curiosity

Raymond Laflamme was the founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, a position he held for 16 years, and he has been an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for more than two decades. He is known as one of the world’s leading experts on quantum information science, and was recently appointed as the chair of the Expert Panel on Quantum Technologies assembled by the Council of Canadian Academies. In this conversation with Lauren and Colin, Laflamme explains the incredible potential power of quantum technologies, and what drew him back to his native Canada to pursue research in the field. He shares how his life and career were influenced by his famous PhD supervisor, Stephen Hawking, and how his insatiable curiosity kept him motivated during his recent battle with lung cancer.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, their motivations, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate

Hilding Neilson on stellar stories

Hilding Neilson is an astrophysicist who works at the intersection of science, astronomy, and Indigenous knowledge. He joins co-hosts Colin and Lauren for a fascinating conversation about the ways humans make sense of the vast night sky, via telescopes, mathematics, and traditional knowledge passed through generations. Neilson – who recently started a new role as an Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland – probes the physics of stars, from the nuclear-burning cores out to the circumstellar medium where stellar winds interact with the interstellar medium. As a Mi’kmaw person, he strives to embrace and integrate Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to better understand the stars, the universe, and our place in it.
We are looking for feedback about our audience’s preferences as we chart the path forward. Please take a few minutes and fill out our podcast listener survey.
Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, their motivations, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.
The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate