B rain gain and abundant funds for infrastructure are signs of a far rosier research climate than Canada could boast a few years ago. Key to the about-face are the country’s overall budget—Canada is the only G8 country with a surplus—and its goals of doubling the number of graduate students and moving from the world’s 15th to 5th biggest R&D spender per capita by 2010. Physics, along with other fields in the sciences and humanities, is benefiting from the new money being injected into research.
“There have been some significant changes that have made Canada more hospitable for basic research,” says Pekka Sinervo, a high-energy physicist and interim dean for arts and sciences at the University of Toronto. The low point was the federal belt-tightening of the mid-1990s, he adds. “We had to make cuts, shrinking the entire university by 10%. The situation has improved. There is an engagement of...
