Ambitious new theories dreamed up to explain reality have led us nowhere. Meet the hardcore physicists trying to think their way out of this black hole

Janelle Barone

YOU may have heard that physics is in crisis. We were told that it would reveal the secrets to the origin of the universe and the fundamental nature of reality. Stephen Hawking even told us that it would “show us the mind of God“. But the big discoveries have dried up. Yes, we found the Higgs boson and detected gravitational waves, but they were predicted decades ago. None of the really ambitious ideas from the past 30 years or so have come good.

So, what’s going on? To find out, I have come to the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a facility dedicated to forging – as its mission statement has it – “new, mind-bending ideas about the ultimate nature of our universe”. It is home to perhaps the greatest concentration of theoretical physicists in the world, and they enjoy more freedom than most to think bold thoughts. If anyone can shed light on the crisis – and perhaps point to a way out of it – it would be the people here.

Neil Turok, director of the institute, doesn’t deny there is a crisis. When I am led to his office for what I am told will be a 15-minute conversation, he regales me for an hour, starting with an unflinching assessment of his field. “When I got into physics in the early 80s, it stopped being successful,” he says. Yikes.

Many of his colleagues don’t put it so strongly. Some prefer to avoid the term crisis. But they are no strangers to the perception that theoretical physics, at least at its most ambitious, is in a funk.

“We firmly believe there are crisp answers …