Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, July 9, 2008 - Incoming Scientific Director Neil Turok is pleased to announce the appointment of three new eminent international scientists to serve on Perimeter Institute's Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC). 

“It has been a real pleasure to start working with staff members at PI over the past month, to plan for the future and to discuss those plans with some key members of the global theoretical physics community” says Dr. Turok. “I have been very encouraged by the support widely expressed for PI: there is a strong wind of goodwill behind us. One indication of this was the enthusiasm with which our invitations to serve on PI’s Scientific Advisory Committee were received. The following distinguished scientists will be joining the SAC. We are very grateful to them for agreeing to take on this role and look forward to welcoming them to PI for the next SAC meeting”.

Professor Sir Michael Berry is the Melville Wills Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol. He is one of the world’s leading mathematical physicists, having made seminal contributions in many fundamental areas, especially those lying on the difficult boundary between quantum and classical physics, between waves and rays. He has made many beautiful and unexpected discoveries, including the quantum Berry phase; mathematical singularities in rainbows and on swimming pool floors; and the relation between quantum chaos and Riemann zeros.

Professor John Preskill is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he directs the Centre for the Physics of Information. He is well known for his work on early universe cosmology and magnetic monopoles, quantum aspects of gravitation and the cosmological constant, and for the last decade, quantum computation and quantum information. He famously won a bet with Stephen Hawking, that black hole evaporation was a unitary process. His recent papers discuss how quantum information escapes as black holes evaporate, without violating unitarity.

Professor David N. Spergel is the Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University. His research interests range over all aspects of cosmology, from the early universe to dark matter and current observations of large scale structure and the cosmic microwave sky. He is also involved in developing new technologies to search for planets around nearby stars. He led the theoretical effort on the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite project, and is a key member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope team.

About Perimeter Institute

Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent, non-profit, scientific research and educational outreach organization where international scientists cluster to push the limits of our understanding of physical laws and calculate new ideas about the very essence of space, time, matter, and information.  The award-winning research centre provides a multi-disciplinary environment to foster research in areas of Cosmology, Particle Physics, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Information, Superstring Theory, and related areas.  The Institute, located in Waterloo, Ontario, also provides a wide array of educational outreach activities for students, teachers, and members of the general public across the country and beyond in order to share the joy of scientific research, discovery, and innovation. In partnership with the Governments of Canada and Ontario, Perimeter Institute continues to be a successful example of private and public collaboration in science research and education.

Prof. Sir Michael Berry

Prof. John Preskill

 
Prof. David Spergel