Science Boyz

On Sunday, on Roger's Cable channel, we can watch a lecture from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. It's on right before Family Guy, so you know we're all glued to the screen. We have seen lectures on quantum computing, probabilities and particle physics, to name a few topics. The public lectures are all geared for actual people, albeit those with some kind of science background. I don't know if I could actually sit through an entire lecture without becoming distracted and pulling all my fingernails off, but watching it on television with the occasional switch to something a little easier on the brain (Family Guy) is okay.

What is insane is that even the nerdiest, pants-pulled-up past the actual waist, pocket-protecting human calculator guy eventually starts to look pretty damn sexy when he's throwing all these esoteric theories around like so many grocery list items.

Almost everyone at the Perimeter Institute is a man, except for one woman faculty member in the Quantum Gravity department. Many, if not all (I haven't double-checked this) are white, or variations on white. There are some female postdocs and grad students, but not many. Overwhelmingly male. I have never seen a woman give one of the public tv lectures, but I don't watch every one of them.

The PI is a privately-funded place where people go and just do research. No teaching, although several faculty are affiliated with the University of Waterloo and have graduate students that way. On the home page there's an announcement that Mike Lazaridis (founder of PI) has just donated another $50 million to the institute, bringing his total personal contribution to $150million. Mike Lazaridis is also the founder and president of Research in Motion...yes, the people who bring you the Blackberry. Crackberry. He appears to have a lot of money.

(Detroit just won the Stanley Cup. It appears that Gary Bettman is as hated in Pittsburgh as he is everywhere else. Nice to see that kind of consistency.)

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except to point out that the PI exists and that these smart boys all start to look really handsome when they're up on a stage using an overhead projector to explain the unification of Einstein's relativity with quantum theory. To point out also that there is a paucity of the female species at PI, and while that could be bothersome, it isn't particularly. Theoretical physics is hard, Barbie. Let's just go and do some chemistry instead.