Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is an independent research centre in foundational theoretical physics located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1999. The Institute's founding and major benefactor is Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Mike Lazaridis.

In addition to research, Perimeter also provides scientific training and educational outreach activities to the general public. This is done in part through Perimeter’s Educational Outreach team.

History

Lazaridis' initial donation of $100 million was announced on October 23, 2000. A subsequent personal donation of $50 million was made on June 4, 2008.

Research operations began in 2001. Along with its research activities, Perimeter Institute operates an international outreach program. It hosts the International Summer School for Young Physicists every summer, which is a physics camp for high school students.

Under the stewardship of Howard Burton, the Institute's first Executive Director, PI initially operated out of Waterloo's historic post office on King Street. In October 2004, it moved into its custom-built facility on Caroline Street, across Silver Lake from Waterloo Park. The building was designed by Montreal architect firm Saucier + Perrotte, which received a Governor General's Medal for Architecture for the design in May 2006. The building next to PI, housing the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, won the same award for its architects in 1997. Perimeter Institute's building features an open glass facade along the north and west sides, contrasting with the slate-black metal walls of much of the rest of the building. Each researcher's office, as well as various lounge areas, features a full-wall blackboard for working out and theorizing in solo or group efforts.

Public

In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, it has suffered in more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.

The name "public" originates with the Latin publicus (also poplicus), from populus, and in general denotes some mass population ("the people") in association with some matter of common interest. So in political science and history, a public is a population of individuals in association with civic affairs, or affairs of office or state. In social psychology, marketing, and public relations, a public has a more situational definition.John Dewey defined (Dewey 1927) a public as a group of people who, in facing a similar problem, recognize it and organize themselves to address it. Dewey's definition of a public is thus situational: people organized about a situation. Built upon this situational definition of a public is the situational theory of publics by James E. Grunig (Grunig 1983), which talks of nonpublics (who have no problem), latent publics (who have a problem), aware publics (who recognize that they have a problem), and active publics (who do something about their problem).

Neil Turok

Neil Geoffrey Turok (born 16 November 1958) is a South African physicist, and the Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His work has been in the area of mathematical physics and early universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe. Recent evidence for gravitational waves from the Big Bang appeared to provide evidence against this model, though the claim that the BICEP2 experiment has detected gravitational waves has since been thrown into considerable doubt.

Early life and career

Turok was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Mary (Butcher) and Latvian-born Ben Turok, who were activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress. After graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge, Turok gained his doctorate from Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Professor David Olive, one of the inventors of superstring theory. After a postdoctoral post at Santa Barbara, he was an associate scientist at Fermilab, Chicago. In 1992 he was awarded the Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University, then held the Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge starting in 1997. He was appointed Director of the Perimeter Institute in 2008.

Perimeter

A perimeter is a path that surrounds a two-dimensional shape. The word comes from the Greek peri (around) and meter (measure). The term may be used either for the path or its length - it can be thought of as the length of the outline of a shape. The perimeter of a circle or ellipse is called its circumference.

Calculating the perimeter has considerable practical applications. The perimeter can be used to calculate the length of fence required to surround a yard or garden. The perimeter of a wheel (its circumference) describes how far it will roll in one revolution. Similarly, the amount of string wound around a spool is related to the spool's perimeter.

Formulas

The perimeter is the distance around a shape. Perimeters for more general shapes can be calculated as any path with where is the length of the path and is an infinitesimal line element. Both of these must be replaced with other algebraic forms in order to be solved: an advanced notion of perimeter, which includes hypersurfaces bounding volumes in -dimensional Euclidean spaces can be found in the theory of Caccioppoli sets.

Institute

An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose.

Educational institutes

Often they are research organisations (research institutions) created to do research on specific topics. An institute can also be a professional body.

In some countries institutes can be part of a university or other institutions of higher education, either as a group of departments or an autonomous educational institution without a traditional university status such as a "university Institute". (See Institute of Technology)

The word "institute" comes from the Latin word institutum meaning "facility" or "habit"; from instituere meaning "build", "create", "raise" or "educate".

In some countries, such as South Korea and Japan, private schools are sometimes called institutes, rather than schools. In Spain secondary schools are called institutes.

Great Britain

In the United Kingdom and the Isle of Man the term "institute" is a protected word and companies or other organizations may only use the word if they are "organisations which are carrying out research at the highest level or to professional bodies of the highest standing". Furthermore, if a company is carrying on a business under a different name to the company name, that business name must comply with the Business Names Act. Use of the title "institute" requires approval from the Secretary of State. Failure to seek approval is a criminal offence.