The Templeton Frontiers Program at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

The Templeton Frontiers Program at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics supports ambitious high risk/high payoff research which aims to make a big breakthrough in fundamental physics. We aim to solve big questions about the universe at the largest and smallest scales: What is time? What is space? Why the quantum? What was before the big bang? Why is our universe hospitable to life? In order to inform responses to these questions, the program supports work along three broad fronts: 1) Foundational questions in cosmology, 2) The emergence of space and time from a more fundamental network of relationships, and 3) The foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. Among the early successes of the program has been a new approach to the question of why time has a direction, based on discoveries by postdoc Flavio Mercati and two collaborators. Project leader Neil Turok and his collaborators have developed new methods for resolving the big bang singularity, as well as a fundamental new description of quantum tunneling whose manifold applications extend from laboratory physics and chemistry to the processes which are central to the 'inflationary landscape' scenario.