Physicist Asimina Arvanitaki thinks big: enormous particles and a gigantic, dark-matter beacon – and knows how we might find them

The blue section shows dark matter in galaxy MACS J0416.1-2403 NASA, ESA, STScI, and CXC

“At first, we thought it was absurd,” Asimina Arvanitaki tells me when we meet in her office at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. I’m not surprised. How else could you respond to the idea that black holes generate swirling clouds of planet-sized particles that could be the dark matter thought to hold galaxies together?

But this sort of thing is Arvanitaki’s speciality. The Aristarchus chair in theoretical physics, she is making a name for herself by taking neglected ideas, however far out they might sound, and then devising ingenious, inexpensive experiments to test them out.

At a time when many seem to find it increasingly hard to matchmake ideas in theoretical physics and experiments, her knack for that, allied to her tendency to stray from the beaten path, sets Arvanitaki apart. “I get bored easily,” she says. “I want to see stuff. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

She can’t recall a moment she decided to spend her life grappling with the mysteries of the universe, but she does remember the time, as a child in mainland Greece, when she found out the value for the speed of light. “I calculated that it takes 8 minutes for light to get from the sun to Earth,” she says. “And I realised then that we always see the past of things, we can never see the present.”

She liked space, but she also liked cars, and at high school had to decide between engineering and physics. “I realised I was more interested in understanding why …