Physicists and business figures gather in Vancouver to crack theory of everything

Galison is among several leading thinkers who arrived at the Quantum Gravity Conference for the launch a new global research collaborative known as the Quantum Gravity Institute in Vancouver.

While speakers at the conference are primarily scientists, including Nobel laureates Jim Peebles, Sir Roger Penrose and Kip Thorne, those behind the institute come from less likely fields.

The Quantum Gravity Society represents a group of business, technology and community leaders. Founding members include Frank Giustra of Fiore Group, Terry Hui of Concord Pacific, Paul Lee and Moe Kermani of Vanedge Capital and Markus Frind of Frind Estate Winery. They are joined by physicists Penrose, Abhay Ashtekar, Philip Stamp, Bill Unruh and Birgitta Whaley.

During a panel discussion, Lee said he’s been asked several times why Vancouver would host such an event or institute.

“Why Vancouver? Because we can,” Lee said.

Hui, who studied physics as part of his undergraduate degree, said organizing the conference and launching the institute felt like fulfilling a childhood dream.

“I left the field to pursue other things, you know,” he said in an interview.

“How do I put this?” he said, before likening it to being a guy who never made the high school hockey team getting to hang out in the Canucks’ locker room.

Hui said he wanted to help and saw his role as philanthropic, adding he believed it would benefit Vancouver economically.

As a non-local and the founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, Galison said he’s happy to see more interdisciplinary support for exploring some of the biggest questions in science.

He called the conference an interesting event for bringing together people in technology and venture capitalism with scientists from varied fields. The launch of the institute is also meaningful, he said.

“It’s also a kickoff event for something much bigger and longer-lasting.”

As for the central question of the conference, Galison said it’s an opportunity to explore where the theories overlap and where they don’t from different angles.

“One place they intersect is clearly at the beginning of the universe, early cosmology, because when energy is incredibly compressed, when you have enormous energy densities, you’re at the limit where the bending of space and time creates so much energy that quantum effects come into play,” he said.

The theory of quantum mechanics, introduced in the 1920s, entered a world already shaken by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which inspired responses not just from scientists but from poets and philosophers, he said.

“That these things are not compatible is really unnerving,” Galison said.

Cracking the code for why isn’t something that will happen in a moment, a week or a year, he said.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work,” he said. “It’s more like building a cathedral than throwing up a bicycle shed.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 17, 2022.

Amy Smart, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Physicists and business figures gather in Vancouver to crack theory of everything

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