Filming begins! With Carlo Rovelli and Katie Mack at Perimeter Institute

Today was a very big day for us. We officially started filming! After the campaign wrapped up we took a few months to set everything in motion, from fleshing out the scientific narrative, honing the creative approach, talking to the scientists and philosophers who will participate, and of course building our production team. With all (most?) of the pieces in place, we officially started filming the first interviews: one with cosmologist Katie Mack and another with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. The plan was to film both at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario— a really great place in every way, but surprisingly not super straightforward to get to, especially with loads of equipment. Andrew decided to fill up the cars with equipment and crew and drive nine hours, while Matt and I trained to Buffalo and rented a car to drive the rest of the way.

The border officer has no doubt heard all sorts of “reasons for visiting Canada”, but never this one. He had to be assured that, yes, you can in fact make a whole documentary film about physics. 

Katie Mack, Cosmologist

Katie is the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication. She took us on a dizzying tour of the universe that spanned scales  from the atomic to the cosmological. Even more dizzying was Katie’s descriptions of the theories that live at these scales! She unpacked Einstein’s relativity theory with a rare clarity—which we pretty much expected given her dual status as a leading researcher in cosmology and a famous science communicator.

We did not expect to be equally captivated by her description of the weird quantum world. Katie really … with .. of just how uncomfortable the revelations of quantum mechanics were to its many of its discoverers. She was also very honest about her own uneasiness with some of the philosophical implications of this theory. As scientists committed to an objective reality, what do you do with a theory that suggests that the world only becomes real in the context of our observations of it?

Katie dropped several existential thought-bombs like this, before heading back to her office to solve some cosmic mysteries. 

Side note: if you're looking for a fun, feel-good read about the end of the universe, you can check out Katie's book: The End of Everything! Carlo Rovelli, Theoretical Physicist

A true renaissance man (and not just because he's from Italy), Carlo is one of the world's leading researchers in quantum gravity (and co-inventor of loop quantum gravity), and has also written seven books on physics. Seven! At first, Carlo told us he’d only be able to talk for an hour due to his busy schedule of his one-day-a-week at Perimeter. Then we sent him a list of questions to give him an idea of the focus of the interview. These focused on some of the meta-questions around the true goal of physics. Carlo read the list and must have been pleased by their philosophical leaning, because he cleared his schedule and spent the rest of the day with us. 

As a master storyteller, the highlights of Carlo’s interview were his wonderful metaphors. These really brought to life some thorny philosophical ideas, like the relationship between scientific models and the reality that they depict. We also got into relational quantum mechanics, the problem with string theory, and the nature of revolutions in scientific thought. We’ll see how much we can squeeze into the film.

We wrapped at Perimeter with some filming around the gorgeous, labyrinthine building. A famous feature of Perimeter is the ubiquity of blackboards (white boards are banned). We like to imagine that the seed of the next great theoretical revolution is hidden among the arcane Hagomoro chalk scratchings that we caught in the background of our B-roll that day.