In early December, Turok outlined his plans for the institute to a group of scientists who had come to Waterloo for a five-day conference. “There has never been an investment in our field on this scale,” he told them. “In all of history.” The gathering was in itself an example of Perimeter’s unorthodox approach. Rather than flying in potential post-docs for research presentations and interviews, as is customary, Perimeter had simultaneously assembled twenty-six recent and soon-to-be Ph.D.s and had them give talks to each other. They came from universities and laboratories in eleven different countries, from Italy to Israel to India, and their expertise spanned particle physics, quantum gravity, cosmology, quantum information, and string theory. Smolin, the conference organizer, acknowledged on the first morning of talks that it was unusual to mix scientists from such disparate fields, but noted also that combatting the prevailing trend of extreme specialization is one of Perimeter’s ideals. “We all have the same goal, which is to discover the laws of nature,” he said. “It’s silly to talk about ‘interdisciplinarity,’ because we’re all in the same discipline.” The real goal, he quipped, was to promote “disciplinarity.”

Then the young physicists took over, guiding the audience through their onscreen presentations with a tattered black and gold hockey stick (“In Spain, we use the sword of a bullfighter,” joked Enrique Fernandez-Borja, a quantum gravity theorist from the University of Valencia). The talks were challenging, even for such a rarefied audience. Later that night, though, in the more casual setting of the Black Hole Bistro, ideas flowed freely. Over a table laden with wine and cheese, a Canadian post-doc claimed that if the difficulties plaguing the Large Hadron Collider could be worked out, the accelerator might finally detect dark matter. “If the lhc doesn’t find anything — the Higgs, at least — that’s it,” he said, gesturing expansively. “Particle physics is over.”

Across the room, a cosmology grad student from Caltech was weighing her beliefs about the origins of the universe. “I’m about seventy percent inflationary, thirty percent cyclic,” she said. The findings of the Planck satellite, due to reach its final orbit 2.4 million kilometres from Earth later this year, would represent a crucial test, she noted. If it succeeded in detecting gravitational waves, that would rule out the cyclic theory. Stephen Hawking, for one, thinks that’s exactly what will happen — and he has backed that up by making a public bet with Turok.

Turok was playing the role of host at the reception, circulating and welcoming the visitors, but it’s ultimately his scientific leadership that will guide Perimeter’s new post-docs in their quest to join the pantheon of great physicists. That means pushing theories — even cherished ones — to their limits, and keeping an eye on experimental results. On that front, he and Hawking were still working out the terms of their bet. “He’s going to fly in space on Virgin Galactic in, I think, eighteen months’ time, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s make that the bet: if I win, I go,” Turok said, grinning. “But he wouldn’t agree to that.” Whatever the terms, the outcome won’t be determined by abstract beauty or mathematical symmetry. “Stephen is a great one for sticking to principle and saying, ‘That’s what the theory predicts, but if the data disagree I accept that I’m wrong.”