I was born in 1950 in Toronto, Canada, spent my primary and high school years living a middle-class existence in a country that I thought then, and continue to think, is a paragon of community ideals that I value, even in this crazy world of here and now, that may or may not be careening out of control. My paternal side was “United Empire Loyalist”, leaving the USA at the American revolution for very early Ontario as British patriots. The ancestral rest were midlands English and Scottish, with an eighth Irish, and a dash of Norse from northernmost Scotland.
Brought up on tea and Sunday roasts, I purposefully, and regretfully, hid my talent growing up to be well-integrated in the exterior, but my interior became enamoured with the history of human thought in all aspects—symbolism, ancient wisdom, and ultimately science, which means knowledge, encompassing all. And physics and maths were to me promised to be, and became for me, the essence of human knowing.
As a teenager, I wanted to write, and I have written to myself almost daily throughout my long career, on my science thought, to be sure, but also on my understanding of self—my self and your selves: nearly a thousand“lab books” with only a small fraction released to the world as papers, not the best method to optimize a career, but cosmic truth is never reached, only approached—if even that.
Around my birth, George Gamow wrote One Two Three… Infinity, a tale of universal history from his conception of the evolution of the universal stuff, the ylem, through origins of earth and life, and the role of mathematics in all this. When young, this story of “life, the universe and everything”, had impact on me, as it did on many physicists of my now august age. The great Gamow wrote his concept of the cosmic tale circa 1950, integrating his quite incomplete knowledge then, including predicting a cosmic photon afterglow (CMB, discovered six decades ago) as a follow-on of nucleosynthesis of the light nuclei in the first moments of the instability of space and time we call the Big Bang. We cosmologists are dedicated to developing that origins story in the (cosmic) light of our current precise knowing, living through my five decades as working
theoretical physicist, which we now dub as the golden age of cosmology, a marriage of physics theory, exquisite experimentation, and analysis that give humans the audacity to think we can understand Universe from near-beginning to now, and beyond, which encompasses all things. What times George Efstathiou and I, and our many friends on this cosmic path, have lived through. I refer to it as the cosmic “movable feast”, with the science developed at our many meetings in centres all over the world and throughout the decades, most often celebrating what we were up to in real human feasts, of gastrophysics, and of ideas of physics and of humans, my hobby if it can be said I have one.
Back to my cosmic history: I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto, in MPC, Math Physics and Chemistry, considered to be the hardest course. But I did rather well. And at the University of Toronto, I got enamoured with the collective in physics, then as superfluid as macroscopic quantum state, a condensate, with fluctuations superposed, and transport theory how they evolve. I went to Caltech for grad school armed with that view of knowing Universe as a collective, with entropy and phase underlying my thesis on neutrino transport in gravitational collapse. This is the theme behind everything I have done since, as quantum information theory, with life the universe and everything now understood as quantum cosmology playing out, uniting macrocosm and microcosm, which is what the golden age did, expanding what is macro to beyond our horizon, and micro to the subnuclear. And thus, from Caltech to Berkeley, where George and I first worked on massive neutrinos, then on dark matter, with Alex Szalay on both, to Stanford and Cambridge. There, and in my hometown of Toronto, George and I built the (polarized) photon, neutrino, dark matter, and gas transport codes, taking conditions emerging from the early Universe through to observable consequences, what CMB experiments would see, and with a large cast of friends, how the transport would evolve into the interconnected cosmic web of galaxies that we understand so spectacularly now. With deep cosmic mysteries still to solve in our next five decades. Who would have thought in astrophysics, that most international of subjects, that I would return to Toronto for four decades of professorship after Stanford, and play a major role in developing astro in Canada and worldwide through the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, proudly awarded the Order of Canada and of Ontario, recognizing that role, of mentoring all ages of fellow researchers. And I continue to write my lab books, and integrate my current cosmic knowing into a Gamow-like tale of“life, the universe, and everything”.
21 October 2025 Hong Kong
