Outreach
Perimeter continues to lead the conversation in Canada around topics in physics research, training, and educational outreach. We share the joy of discovery and, this year, the renewed bustle of activities in and around Perimeter through a variety of channels: social media, videos, podcasts, traditional media, public lectures, and more.
Engagement with Perimeter’s website continues to be high, with more than 215,000 page views from 146,000 unique visitors to Inside the Perimeter, the Institute’s up-to-date place for engaging and accessible science content. The Perimeter Institute main website, perimeterinstitute.ca, hosted more than 337,000 unique visitors, racking up more than 1.1 million total page views in 2022/23.
Interest in Perimeter’s social media posts has grown tremendously over the past year, with renewed activity on posts across all platforms. The Institute’s accounts collectively gained over 19,000 followers and subscribers in 2022/23. Perimeter’s LinkedIn followers alone grew by 39 percent, and Instagram followers by 17 percent.
Perimeter’s YouTube channel continues to host Conversations at the Perimeter as well as the new Quantum 101 series of educational videos on the basics of quantum mechanics, featuring Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at Perimeter.“6” The Perimeter YouTube channel also offers videos of all archival public lectures hosted at the Institute; these videos continue to be enormously popular, having accumulated more than 15 million views to date.
Since Perimeter’s inception, an essential part of its mission has been to engage the public and keep people informed about the exciting science happening around them.
With renewed physical presence in the Perimeter building and the return of conferences and workshops bringing world-leading researchers back to Waterloo, Perimeter was able once again to host public lectures in the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas. This year saw a limited number of public events: three public lectures and a week-long screening of the IMAX movie Secrets of the Universe, partially filmed at Perimeter. In total, this year’s public lectures were enjoyed in person by more than 560 local attendees.
Katie Mack, Perimeter Institute’s Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication, and Ken Clark, associate professor at Queens University, co-hosted a hybrid public lecture titled “An Enlightening Evening of Dark Matter,” with in-person audiences at Perimeter and the McDonald Institute and many more joining online.
Stephon Alexander, a professor of physics at Brown University, spoke about the jazz of physics – the musical journey of the mind and the cosmos.
Public screenings were held for Secrets of the Universe, a 3D film documentary by physicist Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez filmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Perimeter Institute.
Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study spoke on the meaning of spacetime.
All the public lectures are available on Perimeter’s YouTube channel and on the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive, free to watch across the country and around the world.
“Taking Canada’s world-leading scientific research to new heights,” National Post, June 7, 2023
“Scientists explore why identity and history matter in science,” CBC Radio’s Ideas, April 21, 2023
“Physicists rewrite a quantum rule that clashes with our universe,” Wired, December 18, 2022
“Physicists are still trying to understand time,” NPR, December 15, 2022
“The business case for quantum computing,” MIT Sloan Management Review, March 7, 2023
