Leaps of Faith

Here's someone who understands the importance of basic, theoretical physics research - Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion (i.e. make of the Blackberry).

That's one reason why, in 1999, Lazaridis donated $100 million of his nascent fortune to seed the institute. Another, he says, is "because people take theoretical physics for granted." No kidding. This world of equations and chalk dust is about as far away as you can get from the world of commerce. Why anyone would hand over such a massive amount of money—at the time, close to one-fifth of Lazaridis's net worth—to a collection of wild-haired math freaks is lost on most of the folks on Bay Street. Sure, Lazaridis knows that quarterly earnings are important. (In its most recent quarter, RIM posted a higher-than-expected profit of $412.5 million and shipped 2.2 million new BlackBerrys, the first time in the company's history that it broke through the two-million-mark in a quarter.) But he also knows that without the kind of work being done at Perimeter, chances are slim that someone will develop another world-beating technology like RIM's 60 or 80 years down the line.

Many of the CEO's of major technological and electronics companies are aware of this. The question is, do the general public and the politicians know this?

Zz.

Physicists Set Record For Network Data Transfer

The recent Supercomputing 2006 Bandwidth Challenge set a record for sustained data transfer. This is in anticipation of the huge amount of data that will be coming out of the LHC once it is operational. Such huge data will also be distributed to many parts of the world and certainly presents a significant computing and network challenge.

I think a lot of people do not realize how much of the technological advancement in computing/networking, especially high-speed networking, have been driven by the needs that came out of physics. Forget about the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN (which many people still don't realize). The need to handle such large amount of data, and to be able to transfer it efficiently to all over the world, have driven many improvement and advances in computing that are now being used in places such as stock exchanges.

There are many things that people see as a direct outcome of scientific research, but there are also many things they take for granted that they do not realize that also came as the byproduct of scientific research. This is one such example.

Zz.