Last week’s flurry of news stories about celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking ended with official denials that he’s going to “move to Canada” and make his new home at the Perimeter Institute just south of the main UW campus.
The excitement was started by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, which said Hawking would leave his life-long base at the University of Cambridge as a “protest” against British government cuts in science and education funding. A spokesman firmly denied that he has any such plans.
However, Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, will make an appearance in Waterloo this summer, Perimeter recently confirmed. Neil Turk, director of Perimeter and a former colleague of Hawking at Cambridge, said the famous scientist will “visit” in June and July “to conduct scientific research and participate in a televised outreach event.”
Said a news release: “The world’s most famous living scientist, Prof. Hawking has made several path-breaking contributions to theoretical physics. His visit to Waterloo will mainly focus on scientific research and private collaborations with other leading physicists at PI. Prof. Hawking will also take part in the institutes award winning outreach program by delivering a special lecture to be broadcast on TVO across Canada.”
Said Turok: “We hope Stephen’s visit to Perimeter will be just the first of many. His ideas have had a huge impact on our basic understanding of the universe. He is an exceptional communicator, whether to our scientists or to the wider public. We are delighted he has agreed to deliver a televised lecture, to be shown across Canada. And we are looking forward to his impressions of the Stephen Hawking Centre at Perimeter Institute, now under construction.”
Last October, when the expansion to the facility was named in his honor, Hawking said that “our field of theoretical physics has been the most successful and cost-effective in all science. Where would we be today without Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein? Many great challenges lie ahead. Where this new understanding will lead is impossible to say for sure. What we can say with confidence, is that expanding the Perimeter of our knowledge will be the key to our future.”
Perimeter is not part of the university, but has close links through the cross-appointment of many faculty members as well as shared projects and a jointly operated master’s degree program.
It will be the first Waterloo visit for Hawking, who uses and wheelchair and communicates through a voice synthesizer because of neuromuscular dystrophy. However, he already has many connections to the institution, the Perimeter news release noted: “Prof. Hawking holds a Distinguished Research Chair at PI, which will see him regularly visit for extended periods. He is also a Patron of the Innovative Perimeter Scholars International, a master’s course that nurtures future physics researchers, and will oversee a graduation ceremony for the first class of PSI scholars when he visits.
“Prof. Hawking was also Honorary President of the recent Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future festival, celebrating the 10th anniversary of PI, took part via video in the presentation ‘Perimeter Institute – Past, Present & Future’, and appears in PI’s award winning television documentary ‘The Quantum Tamers: revealing Our Weird, Wired Future.’”
It said a special PI presentation involving Hawking will be broadcast on TVO on Sunday, June 20. “Something TVO does really well is to bring big ideas and bright minds into homes across Canada,” says Lisa de Wilde, the network’s Chief Executive Officer. “And they don’t come any bigger or brighter than Professor Hawking.”
Stephen Hawking the release says, “has made several extraordinary contributions to the fundamental theoretical physics, especially in establishing the classical and quantum properties of black holes and in building quantum gravitational theories of the origin of the universe and structures within it. His most celebrated work was the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, known as Hawking radiation.” He retired as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge – a position once held by Isaac Newton – last year when he turned 67.
