The south façade of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics tells you a lot about the problems the people inside are working on. And the inside tells you a lot about how those problems may ultimately be solved.

The wall is an imposing black plane, pierced by apparently random blocks of windows. It’s as if a giant, impenetrable code has been embossed on the surface— an apt reflection of the daunting challenges that face today’s theoretical physicists as they seek to understand space, time, matter and information at the most basic level. The search for a unified “theory of everything,” pursued most famously by Einstein in the last century, has yet to produce any satisfying results. Some of the esoteric concepts being investigated at the Institute—superstring theory, quantum gravity, quantum information theory—offer promising windows of understanding, but there’s still no complete and coherent picture of how the universe works.

If any such picture is going to emerge, it will likely happen through a combination of brilliant individual insight and intense collaboration. Perimeter Institute is designed to foster both. The light-filled interior offers fiftysome resident researchers—plus 300 visiting scholars each year—a soothing, cocoon-like environment for contemplative thought and complex calculation. And in a telling gesture, there’s no system of clocks on the walls.

Insights like Einstein’s don’t happen on a schedule. Nor are they likely to happen in isolation. That’s why the Institute’s new building— funded in part by an investment from the Ontario Innovation Trust—also offers plenty of space for both formal and informal interaction. Blackboards are scattered through the hallways to enable the quick interchange of ideas. There are comfortable lounge areas, espresso machines, and a bistro—plus two seminar rooms and a 205-seat lecture theatre. If the Institute is about having ideas, it’s also about sharing them.

Why devote such significant resources to questions that seem to have no connection to daily life? The short-term reasons include attracting the world’s best minds to Canada, and seeding society with new generations of deep thinkers. But there’s a solid long-term rationale as well: apparently abstract theories often lead to very practical applications. One example is the work of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In the 1860s, Maxwell was the first to successfully describe a unified understanding of the forces of electricity and magnetism. At the time, it was a purely theoretical insight. But over the decades that followed, Maxwell’s equations provided the foundation needed to launch the communications revolution that defined the twentieth century.

It’s hard to predict what new, fundamental knowledge will emerge from Perimeter Institute or how others will apply the ideas to society, but that doesn’t keep the scientists here from patiently searching the dark and difficult field of theoretical physics—like an admirer scanning the south façade—in the firm conviction that the quest will be rewarded.