Senthil Todadri

When I met Neil Turok to discuss the 15-year-old Jacob Barnett and other developments in modern physics, the director of Perimeter Institute was wearing shorts and a floral shirt. The South African cosmologist had been on vacation — still was, technically. But he plainly missed his Canadian home base. I had asked to meet him in Perimeter’s sunny white-furnished ground-floor bistro. But everyone else was there, so it took us a moment to shake ourselves free. Turok paused to say hello to Raymond Laflamme, who runs Perimeter’s cross-town partner the Institute for Quantum Computing, and John Berlinsky, who runs the Perimeter Scholars International program in which Jacob Barnett is the youngest student.