I remember having a total "WTF?!?" moment when I heard Turok, of all people, had been chosen as Perimeter's new director. At the time, Perimeter's reputation was not unlike that of SpaceX or Tesla - a daring, unconventional outfit trying to shake things up with a new approach, and unusually enough endowed with the resources to actually do it. "Things" being very much quantum gravity.
Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!?
If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place.
I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment.
Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it.
Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!?
If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place.
I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment.
Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Scie...
[2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/