Saturday, November 30, 2002

WATERLOO - A wooden ladder climbs the east wall of the office of Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, leading to the inner workings of an immense but broken clock, the visual highlight of the old post office building in downtown Waterloo.

The ladder ends at a tiny door into the ceiling of what is now the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Despite working beside the inviting curio for more than a year, Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara, 31, has never ventured to peek upstairs.

"When I was a kid, I really liked clocks. Clock repair was one of the things I considered going into when I was growing up. But now, the broken clock is right up there above my head and I have absolutely no interest in it," she says.

For a young woman acclaimed for her bold inquisitiveness, it seems an odd response. And while those with broken clocks may lament her decision to instead delve into theoretical physics, members of the academic community -- those who think weighty thoughts about some of the most challenging issues in science -- are beginning to value her change of heart.

Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara recently shared first prize in the US$15,000 Young Researchers competition at the Ultimate Reality Symposium in Princeton, N.J., an event honouring one of America's greatest living physicists, John Archibald Wheeler.

Kenneth Ford, retired director of the American Institute of Physics, calls her a "brilliant young researcher" and the current Scientific American issue features an article hailing her as one of the world's most promising young physicists.

Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara takes the praise in stride.

"It's hilarious, isn't it? They pay me to do this," she says, breaking into a laugh.

From her office in an innovative, privately funded institute, she is now tackling quantum gravity, one of the biggest question marks in science. It is nothing short of searching for a unified theory wrapping together Albert Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum theory.

In essence, picking up where Einstein left off.

For this kind of stuff, there seem few better places than the two-year-old Perimeter Institute, founded through a $100-million donation by Mike Lazaridis, president of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research In Motion.

Officially, Perimeter is a community of scientists dedicated to the bold investigation of theoretical physics. A better description might be a playpen for young geniuses.

The old post office, with its cut- stone exterior, hardwood floors and clock tower, is a large, historic and romantic piece of property.

One floor below Dr. Markop-oulou-Kalamara's office is the institute's recreation area, complete with pool table, sound system, a long bar, coffee machines, and refrigerators of beer, pop and juice. Overstuffed sofas and chairs are arranged around wooden chess sets. In a corner are shelves, filled with more board games.

Only two things set it apart from any refined bar or coffee house.

First are the walls. On almost every vertical surface, there are blackboards covered by scrawls in white chalk: complex formulae, numbers, frantically drawn diagrams and graphs. The boards seem strategically placed, perhaps in case genius strikes when shooting pool or if an argument breaks out on the validity of string theory while making espresso.

Second is the reading material. No Vanity Fair or Esquire. Here are stacks of Physics Today, Physics World and Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara selected Perimeter for a five-year research term -- following a global trot of academic institutions after completing high school in her native Greece -- largely because of the people and the welcoming environment, she says.

The atmosphere, along with the stability from the hefty donations, are crucial to the institute's success, says Howard Burton, its executive director.

"We are a well-endowed institution that has a lot of very strong people who are well-motivated. That's the good news. The bad news is we're in Canada," says Dr. Burton.

"We're in a place that, by and large, does not have a prominent role in the global theoretical physics community. We're not even in a major urban centre. We're not even in Toronto. We're in a place without beautiful geography, without a tropical climate. Physical theorists aren't stupid people, they tend to put their institutes in that sort of place."

Perimeter, however, does provide scientists financial security, technical support and a creative environment, freeing them to think big thoughts and, one hopes, come up with big answers.

The keyword is big. Bigger than big. The biggest. Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara's quest is to construct a sensible, testable, theoretical model of the universe.

It is in the notion of testing that her boldness shows.

"Some say that there will be no way of testing within our lifetime. I think these people are wrong.

"Something like two years before they had direct evidence for atoms, they were writing that we would never know, that we would never be able to test atomic theories. And now look, most of the technology around us is based in some way on the knowledge that atoms exist."

Despite her passion, her interest in theoretical physics developed almost by chance.

"At age 16 or 17 I started getting science magazines and, even more hilariously, computer magazines, even though I didn't have a computer. I went through my nerd phase," she says.

She moved from Athens for a science degree at the University of London, but had no firm idea of what she wanted to study. A high school teacher, noting her proficiency, told her to write theoretical physics on the application.

"I didn't really know what it was when I enrolled but I figured I could always change it once I got there," she says.

While Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara was completing her degree, a friend in graduate school invited her to a lecture on quantum gravity by physicist Chris Isham. Because the lecture was on her way home, she stuck her head in. And became hooked. She applied for graduate studies and persuaded Dr. Isham to be her thesis advisor.

From there, she studied at the Albert Einstein Institute in Berlin and at Pennsylvania State University under Lee Smolin.

Dr. Smolin, who has written highly respected books on quantum gravity and was touted by Discover magazine as "the new Einstein," is also now researching at Perimeter.

More than a dozen researchers from around the world have signed on and moved in to the institute. Daniel Gottesman, from the University of California at Berkeley, arrives in January. Lucien Hardy, from the Centre for Quantum Computation in Oxford, joined last month.

Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara is excited by the community building up at Perimeter. And she is confident that all of the thinking and talking will bring substantial, testable results.

"It would be nice if, in five years, theoretical quantum physics has become real physics."

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