The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Page 25

  At the time Penn State was a premier institution for nonstring quantum gravity, and Markopoulou was surrounded by a number of other brilliant young scientists. “A bunch of different ideas were coming together; there was this sense that you might actually do something faster than the person in the next room, which is very unusual in quantum gravity,” she says. String theory had never appealed to Markopoulou, who saw it as cutthroat and conformist. “String theory has a very strong pecking order,” she says. “It comes with a strong machismo: What complicated stuff can you do? They’re very good at maintaining that.”

  Some of Markopoulou’s contemporaries saw the equations pointing to the conclusion that time is an illusion at the fundamental level, and that what we experience as the progression of events emerges as a byproduct of fluctuations in space. But Markopoulou tended to attack the problem from the other direction—looking at time as the most important thing and space as something that grows out of it, or is left as a trace, like a logbook of what has taken place in time. “I’m a bit extreme in that I would actually like to keep a fairly old-style time,” Markopoulou says. “I’m not wrong in my views. They come with challenges, but they also come with opportunities.”

  In early 2000 whispers went around the theoretical physics community that somebody wanted to donate $100 million for an institute dedicated to foundational physics. Markopoulou and Smolin were approached by Howard Burton, a Canadian with a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Waterloo, who was the emissary for this Gatsby-like figure. “I genuinely thought the guy was a sociologist studying the reactions of physicists to that statement—the amount of money is crazy for foundational physics,” Markopoulou says. By now she was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Berlin. She and Smolin were flown in secrecy to Canada and only informed that the donor was Mike Lazaridis, the founder of BlackBerry, on the drive from the airport: “We spent the night at Mike’s house, where he made us French toast and talked us into coming to Waterloo.”

  By the time Perimeter was set up, she and Smolin had separated, but remained friends—which was just as well. To lay the scientific groundwork for the institute, the three founding faculty huddled together in a former restaurant, along with several postdoctoral students and Burton, whom Lazaridis had appointed as the director. They inherited the coffee machine and learned to make top-notch barista cappuccinos. The institute aspired to a flat management structure hospitable to freethinkers, without tenured jobs or the ordinary hierarchies of a university physics department, in the hope that this would foster more interesting research.

  While Markopoulou was not a forceful leader, she was a persuasive one, says Seth Lloyd, a physicist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime collaborator of Markopoulou’s. He recalls trekking with her and some postdocs in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains when she was on a fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “At each stage of the hike there were different suggestions about where to go, and we always ended up doing what Fotini thought was a good thing,” he says. “We had a great time, none of us ever thought Fotini was imposing her will—just that what Fotini seemed to want to do was the right thing to do.”

  At Perimeter, Markopoulou was at her best when the learning and experimentation were the quickest. Invariably her work became playful and synthetic. “At some point I thought we should just reduce the whole thing to the basic property of space, which is here and there,” she says. Physicists were willing to toy with the nature of time and “hack” general relativity to create a quantum gravity theory, she says. But they seldom played with the nature of space or interfered with quantum theory. With Simone Severini, an Italian computer scientist, and graduate student Tomasz Konopka, Markopoulou drew on quantum information theory to develop the notion of quantum graphity. “Fotini thought it was fun—this cute idea, that the universe is a big network, like the London Underground, that changes over time,” Severini says.

  Markopoulou was partly inspired by the principle of emergence, where complexity can emerge from simplicity, or, more to her point, simplicity from complexity, such as wiggling water molecules forming ice crystals or waves. Paramount in her model was the ability to create images that explained geometrogenesis, her and her colleagues’ term for the emergence of the structure of spacetime during a critical phase in the birth of the universe. “Once it starts being hard to visualize, I’m not happy, I get uncomfortable,” she says. “I also think you can have an extreme richness while staying with very few building blocks.”

  She was tickled by an aperçu from Ludwig Boltzmann, the 19th-century Austrian physicist, who looked at the physical properties of atoms and said, “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry felt himself called upon to devise his own special combination of atoms and vortices, and fancied in having done so that he had pried out the ultimate secrets of the Creator.” Markopoulou chuckles. “It felt to me, when we were arguing ‘Is it my model? Is it your model?’ we were totally every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  In quantum graphity, space evolves out of dots that are either “on” or “off”—connected or disconnected to the next dot. It doesn’t matter exactly what the dots are; they represent coordinates in a network of relationships, the fundamental constituents of the universe. “The value of this is in trying to give, however primitive it might be, some language to talk about space not being there,” she says. The idea, Markopoulou explains, comes from a branch of mathematics known as category theory, in which “what something is, is the sum of how it behaves, rather than how it is.” At the highest possible energy, at the beginning of the universe, all the dots in the graph are joined, and no notion of space exists. But as the system cools and loses energy, the points start detaching, which creates the dimensions and laws of space. In this model, space becomes like a crystal that forms out of a liquid as it cools.

  “It was very courageous of Fotini to start working on this,” says Sabine Hossenfelder, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a think tank devoted to theoretical physics, who from 2006 to 2009 did postdoc work at Perimeter. “It’s the kind of thing you think has been done long ago, but surprisingly it wasn’t.” It would have been much easier, Hossenfelder says, for Markopoulou to find a niche for herself within an existing theory, like loop quantum gravity. “But quantum graphity of course is much more exciting. It’s a new idea, one that could have done a good job bridging the gap between theory and experiment.”

  As Markopoulou’s reputation grew, she was often called upon to represent Perimeter to the public. She was a young, accomplished woman in physics—a rarity. She enjoyed and tended to accept speaking invitations, partly to help change perceptions of female scientists. “For previous generations, the question was ‘Are there women in science?’ Now there are, but girls want to know, ‘Are they normal?’ When you seem to be happy, and you seem to be a woman they’d be happy to be, that’s a fairly big thing.” Her world revolved around quantum gravity. Shortly after separating from Smolin, she had fallen into a relationship with a German postdoctoral fellow at the institute, Olaf Dreyer, whom she married after four years. They lived and breathed their discipline. “It’s nice to share these things with somebody closely,” she says.

  But Markopoulou found her more radical theories were sometimes greeted with the sly criticism that they were “creative.” “The fact that you don’t look like the standard makes it hard for them; they will take longer to form judgments, which means you stay in the doubt area for longer,” she says. It was made worse by the pervasive attitude among physicists that you should gather your laurels by doing sensible calculations throughout your career and only cook up new theories of quantum gravity in your old age.

  Markopoulou refused to play that game, and a sense of discontent began to build. Every problem she solved created a quagmire of fresh ones; and, daughter of sculptors, she was tiring of academic papers as the only tangible thing she could “make.” After a w
hile even her public-facing activities began to grate. “There is a part of me that felt like a kind of clown, telling people magical things about the universe,” she says. “Something you take very seriously and you’ve devoted your life to, and you’ve made your own sacrifices for, is for other people, at best, entertainment.” She consoled herself with something Isham once told her, counsel he’d received in turn from the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. When it comes to quantum gravity, he says, you’re bound to fail. “What’s important is not the fact you fail, but how you fail.” Markopoulou was determined to fail better, to borrow Samuel Beckett’s phrase.

  In 2008 the South African physicist Turok was appointed director of Perimeter. Turok, who describes himself as “very demanding,” pulled back from the more outré flavors of foundational physics and expanded into other areas, including particle physics, cosmology, and quantum computing. He didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be a center for alternative physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”

  By 2009, Markopoulou’s personal life was undergoing its own quantum transitions. At a conference in Waterloo about physics and the financial crisis, organized by Smolin, Markopoulou met systems theorist and physicist Doyne Farmer. The pair was instantly dazzled by one another, and within five days decided to upend their lives to be together. Markopoulou separated from Dreyer and Farmer from his wife. Not long after, she got pregnant on a road trip from San Francisco to Santa Fe in Farmer’s 1967 Datsun convertible. Their son, Maris, was born in 2010; a year later Markopoulou’s mother, Maria, passed away.

  Markopoulou was still attracted to deep inquiry, but the further down she went, the less objective she found her colleagues’ judgments about the value of her work. “If you’re in a place where everything is certain, that’s a very boring place,” she says. “But if you jump out with no parachute, it’s either a sociological exercise or a folly.” She’d been striving to position her research at the metaphorical “edge of chaos,” the point at which order emerges from complexity. But she’d started to get the creeping suspicion she was back with the artists in her mother’s studio, competing for recognition and influence without any clear standards.

  “In the absence of any kind of experimental confirmation or the ability to falsify your theories, quantum gravity has ended up being dominated by a few influential tastemakers,” says Lloyd. “Fotini fell foul of that because she had her own strong sense of what is a good thing to do; her tastes were different.”

  As the institute continued to grow, Turok faced the challenges of needing to formalize its processes and manage larger numbers of physicists. Perimeter had already begun the process of implementing tenure for its faculty, which Turok inherited. Markopoulou prepared to apply. By this time she was back in Berlin again, on a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute. She put together a dossier of her accomplishments for Turok, which was also to be reviewed by a tenure committee and quantum gravity experts.

  Turok says he respected Markopoulou but doubted her work would lead anywhere. He denied her tenure. “Fotini had pursued a very independent line of inquiry that was really very different and hardly acknowledged by leading researchers in the field,” Turok says. “I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out.”

  Markopoulou says she was disappointed that Perimeter had “shifted from a flat hierarchy of scientists to an all-powerful director.” Turok emailed her out of the blue, she says, to stop the review process and deny her tenure. “As a result of my case, an independent consultant was appointed, because I had been the only woman faculty for nine years, I had a strong academic record, and Neil stopped the tenure process just as I had a baby,” Markopoulou says. (“I respectfully beg to differ,” Turok responds. “A tenure review process was never initiated.”) The matter is subject to an out-of-court settlement.

  In the autumn of 2011, Markopoulou walked out of Perimeter for good.

  One sunny morning in March, I visit Markopoulou at her home outside Oxford, perched on a hill and encircled by stands of oak, ash, and silvery birch. Nancy, the wife of the poet and classicist Robert Graves, used to run a grocery store on the site before the poet John Masefield knocked it down to build a theater in 1924. The top rooms sit snug under the original proscenium arch. Markopoulou loves theater—a legacy of being Greek, she says. It allows you to “step out of your normal shoes, to shift reality a bit, and to actively participate by forcing you to suspend your belief.” Not unlike science at its highest levels.

  In the living room, Markopoulou bundles herself up into a burgundy armchair with the cheerful self-possession of a family cat. A Persian rug sprawls across the wood floor, monopolized by a Lego space station. One of her mother’s bronze busts broods from a windowsill, a beautiful, dauby figure of a woman with braids parted down the middle. “You were asking me the other day what made me change,” she says. “One big thing was my mother died and opened up a space for me.” Markopoulou wouldn’t have touched art while her mother was alive, but recognizes now that a similar desire to make, to craft and to create, is part of who she is.

  “In many ways, physics and what I did are almost ideally positioned to my experience with my mother,” she says. “I probably did come out of that wanting a much more firm grasp of what is what and objective decision-making. Now I don’t feel I need it that much anymore, but growing up that was a big deal. Also, it was far away from her, it was my own space, but at the same time there were many ways in which the deeper challenges are the same.” Sculpture is a lot like creating a physics theory, she says, because you have to turn it around and make sure it works from every angle. “You have to understand the essence of what you’re doing before you start, because only then do you have a chance that it’s going to work from all sides.”

  Did she believe this philosophy could help her solve quantum gravity? “I never really wanted to single-handedly solve it. But I never went in thinking that we can’t. I always assumed it was possible.” Does she still think it is? “Not soon, but I don’t know. If I knew, I would be doing it,” she quips.

  During her unsteady transition out of physics, Farmer was a pillar of support for Markopoulou. “I’m very much what I do, so going through a transition is a time when I don’t know who I am,” she says. “I was lucky to have the context where that was perfectly possible.”

  Farmer is a distinguished and idiosyncratic physicist in his own right. While still in grad school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying physical cosmology, he and fellow physicist Norman Packard created one of the world’s first wearable computers. Released in the 1970s, it was a toe-operated device embedded in the tip of a shoe, which allowed the wearer and an accomplice to track the progress of a roulette ball and achieve a 20 percent advantage over the house. He and Packard later decided to found one of the first predictive stock-trading companies, which was ultimately sold to UBS, a financial services company, in 2006. Farmer’s interests now lie in “econophysics,” a field which he founded and which applies the mathematics of natural systems to gather insights about the economy.

  When Farmer landed a post at Oxford University in 2011, Markopoulou was faced with “the usual two-body problem in academia” of trying to find a job nearby. But when she started looking, she realized her heart wasn’t in it. She had been toying with industrial design, and asked the advice of the musician Brian Eno, a physics follower and a friend. He advised her to look into the master’s program in innovation design engineering run by the Royal College of Arts and Imperial College in London, and wrote her a letter of reference.

  She sailed through the admissions process, which included an exercise where prospective students had to explain how they would evade a pack of zombies chasing them toward the lip of a cliff. She enjoyed the classwork but found the mental shift hard at first. “It ju
st felt silly, because you go from ‘This is how the universe started’ to ‘This mattress has these bubbles.’ ”

  But she loved making things, and also made the personal connections that evolved into Doppel. A sailing trip to Greece, in which the Doppel crew nearly scuppered Markopoulou’s and Farmer’s large-bottomed boat on the rocks off the island of Cephalonia, cemented the team’s conviction that they could withstand the trials of doing a startup.

  The kernel for Doppel came from a piece in New Scientist about interoception—the way humans can discern the internal state of the body and conceive of it as “their own.” The idea is that our sense of self is not merely a mental process that somehow envelops the body but somehow arises from the two-way conversation between the brain and other organs. As Manos Tsakiris, the softly spoken psychologist and neuroscientist who advises Doppel, tells me, “You cannot cut off cognition from the rest of the body, and you cannot cut off the body from the rest of the world in which you interact.” By harvesting your natural response to rhythm, Doppel runs counter to the notion that the self resides in the mind alone—that the human is a creature of the will, a maker of rational decisions, a sovereign mind bossing around dumb matter.

  With hindsight, Markopoulou sees her work at Doppel as a “natural evolution” from what she did before. Isham had inspired her to pursue physics as a quest to understand reality from within, when scientists can’t stand apart from what they’re trying to analyze. But now, instead of the universe as the ultimate system, she has the human body. “If you think about physics, it’s a human creation. The equations represent stuff we come up with because of our senses. So shouldn’t our senses be part of what goes into physics?” Markopoulou says.

  Markopoulou thinks that many disputes in science come down to competing metaphysical commitments. She recognizes that her own belief in the fundamental nature of time, and her dislike of timelessness, are moral preferences as much as anything else. “Most of the physics where time does not exist comes with determinism as well. There is something about thinking that time is real and being responsible for your actions,” she tells me.