Michael Borinsky; Seeking hidden realities behind nature’s beauty

For me it was really this classic progression of curiosity. I just started to read and hear about things like E equals mc squared in elementary school and heard about Einstein and then eventually read a book about it and at each step I was just always thinking I have to know and know more about this. This is really interesting. Why is not everyone talking about this all the time? And so I specialized in physics and in mathematics in high school. I'm Michael Burinski, I'm a mathematical physicist and I work at the Perimeter Institute. It was clear to me to go to university to study physics. I got an internship at CERN at the Particle Collider, the LHC in Switzerland. It was a very exciting time because it was around at the time when the Higgs boson was discovered. So I feel very lucky. This is really a fantastic thing about the job or the best thing about it that you have so many situations where you just think about something and you say, how can this be true? Why are there so many colors on the rainbow? And you really want to know like the light, I mean it looks beautiful and so on. It's this beautiful phenomenon but then you just sit there and you want to figure it out why these rainbow colors just show up and you know it has something to do with the sun and with the rain. I think it's this thing that you're not really satisfied with that you really want to know how the raindrops do it, how they make these beautiful patterns and these things they've happened to me very often and sometimes I can say a bit more about why these beautiful phenomena appear and it's a very gratifying job. PI is just a fantastic place, many super interesting minds and ideas. Here at PI it's special that there are so many different ideas and different directions on physics and quantum theory that kind of all talk to each other and yeah I'm like more on the mathematical side but I really enjoy the dialogue also with people who really also think about experiments and how to design them for instance or how to evaluate the data from the experiments. The approach at PI is that it takes a focus on outreach and including like the public and I have this utopian vision probably that in the future more people will have also the opportunities to also do kind of science themselves or live also through these kind of discovery moments themselves to their own level because there are so much more resources now. When I grew up it was still like very difficult to find like accessible information on physics and math. It was all either very simple and basic and frustratingly so or much too complicated and now it's like really a gradient of things that you can engage with and I think this is fantastic and I'm hoping that there's going to be a time when everyone can have like scientific, mathematical, theoretical, physics, positive experiences of discovery always.