G-8

Global economy, Libya and Middle East unrest on the agenda

Last autumn I interviewed Neil Turok, the South African physicist who runs the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Our talk began in expected places and ended somewhere unusual, with Turok making a pitch for “smart aid” to Africa: an approach based on keeping some of the continent’s best minds at home, and sending them reinforcements from around the world to make Africa, at last, a centre of creation and discovery instead of subsistence and strife. Sounds mad, doesn’t it. But Turok has credentials: his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences is well begun and, he hopes, will soon have branches across the continent. The whole interview is worth re-reading, but here’s the part that launches our discussion of some tremendously exciting ideas, coming from a Canadian with African roots, that I want to share with you today. Turok told me: