Turok has, by anyone’s standards, done exceptionally well in this quest (and he can, in fact, lay claim to the Hawking-Turok instanton theory). But at fifty, his focus is as much on finding the next Einstein as on becoming that person. Next Einstein is actually the name of an initiative Turok launched last spring to raise money for the creation of aims centres across Africa — a choice of words he hesitated over. “In theoretical physics,” he says, “you don’t take Einstein lightly. You don’t use his name in vain.” Perimeter will inaugurate a similar program this fall, and though it will have a different name it will be structured much like the aims program: as an intensive ten-month course combining lectures from prominent experts with brief research stints. Turok will nurture links to Africa, while other Perimeter faculty, from India, Argentina, and elsewhere, will do the same with their home countries. “I want PI to serve as a heart for circulating brains, pumping brains around the world,” he says. It is this large-scale opportunity, more than any particular research agenda, that lured Turok, against his initial instincts and despite the advice of mentors such as Gross, to Perimeter.

Turok’s instinct for action beyond academia traces back to his upbringing in South Africa. He was born in Johannesburg in 1958, the son of anti-apartheid activists Mary and Ben Turok. His father was arrested for sabotage in 1962, and served three years in Pretoria Central Prison; his mother was also imprisoned for a time. Upon his father’s release, the family went to Kenya, then Tanzania. In 1968, when Neil was ten, they moved to London, where Ben became the editor of Sechaba, the official journal of the African National Congress. The dislocations of childhood prepared Neil for the nomadic life of a young physicist. Listening to him speak now, the plummy tones of Cambridge, where he started as an undergraduate in 1977, are easier to detect than the clipped vowels of his native South Africa. He returned to Cambridge in 1997, after Ph.D. studies at Imperial College in London, further work in Santa Barbara and Chicago, and a professorship at Princeton.

His parents returned to South Africa in 1993, and both were elected as anc representatives to the country’s parliament when apartheid ended. He was still a full-time faculty member at Cambridge when he set up aims, which began operations in 2003, backed by a partnership between the South African universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and the Western Cape, and the European ones of Cambridge, Oxford, and Paris-Sud. aims attracts promising students from across Africa who have just completed their undergraduate studies. Some go on to pursue further graduate work in mathematical sciences; Turok’s hope is that they will become leaders in whatever field they choose.

“What I saw at aims is the power of mathematical thinking to cut across all cultures and countries,” he says. “The students who arrive at aims are Muslim, Christian, francophone, anglophone, Arab, brown, yellow, white, black. Africa’s incredibly diverse, and many of their countries have been at war. And yet in a short space of time, just thinking about math and science and physics and computing, all those differences disappear. Basically, we’re all kind of humbled in the face of this higher-level knowledge.” Sending these people back into the real world, where they may end up in government or industry or the media, strikes Turok as an eminently worthy goal: “I genuinely believe it’s a force for peace in the future.”

This is the vision that brought Turok to the attention of the wider world. Last year, he received an award for social innovation at the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Dubai, and a prestigious ted (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize at a conference in California, joining previous winners such as Bono and Bill Clinton. And he got a call from the Perimeter Institute.

Perimeter’s home is a jutting, angular, concrete and glass structure overlooking a pastoral stretch of bike path and an old millpond in the heart of Waterloo. Slated for expansion this summer, the building, which opened in 2004, was conceived in close consultation with Perimeter’s scientists. The south facade, with windows punctuating a black aluminum surface like Tetris pieces, was “designed to mimic the experience we might have when confronting esoteric scientific discourse,” one of the architects told Canadian Architect magazine in 2005. The interior, by contrast, is light filled and warm, with glass-walled offices arranged to maximize views of the water yet permit privacy when desired. The hallways are scattered with comfortable nooks furnished with easy chairs, and floor-to-ceiling chalkboards ready to capture the fleeting moments of inspiration that sometimes occur when physicists collide.

Turok’s office is comfortably appointed, with a sleekly modern inner sanctum featuring metal-trimmed furniture and an abstract photograph that picks up the electric yellow-green colour of the wall. The outer room has a warmer feel, with an earth-toned rug, two leather chairs and a loveseat in dark green, and a painting of a wooden fence in the snow. Next to a wall-sized window where snowflakes drifted past, a fireplace flickered so picturesquely that on my first visit I assumed it was a gas fire until, partway through our conversation, a log suddenly shifted in a shower of sparks.

Despite the idyllic setting, Turok’s initial response to the Perimeter board’s job offer was a firm no. He was happy at Cambridge, both personally and professionally. Still, he saw Lazaridis’s commitment to theoretical physics, at a time when so many publicly doubted its power, as an important opportunity. So he agreed to sit on Perimeter’s scientific advisory board. “I came over, and I said, ‘You should do A, B, C, D.’ And more or less immediately, they came back to me and said, ‘Well, you should do it.’”

It was a challenge and a responsibility — a burden, even. “This guy was saying to us, ‘Here are some serious resources. Can you use them to really stimulate progress in the field?’” Turok eventually decided he had to try. In January 2008, while he was in New York preparing his ted Prize acceptance speech, Lazaridis came to see him personally. “I looked him in the eye,” Turok recalls, “and I said, ‘Mike, if I do this, it’s because I believe in it. And I want the freedom to do it well.’” Freedom meant, among other things, asking foundational questions without having to consider whether the answers would yield commercial gadgets. Lazaridis was happy to make that promise, and every other one Turok requested. “At that point,” Turok says, “I felt I couldn’t really say no.” Perimeter announced the appointment in May, a month before Lazaridis announced a further $50-million gift to the institute, topping up his initial $100 million.

When the key principles for Perimeter were first drawn up, the fifth and final element was that it should develop a strong public presence. (The other four were that it should be independent; focus on foundational, non-directed research; be resident based; and have a flat hierarchy.) The institute has pursued that goal through such iniatives as the public lecture series, now broadcast on the Discovery Channel. Turok’s “saving the world through physics” agenda is a new focus, but it builds on these existing efforts to engage with the world at large.