WATERLOO, Ont. - Not since the days of the Avro Arrow has Canada been so well-positioned to lead the world in cosmic innovation: This time, not in the field of aerospace but outer space, specifically theoretical physics and the search for where we came from.

Since June 20, physics-superstar Stephen Hawking has been punching the timecard for six weeks of collaboration with scientists at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont.

Hawking’s presence at the institute is helping elevate the think-tank to new status in the top echelons of international cutting-edge cosmic research.

"Stephen Hawking stands with Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, as one of a handful of scientists who have fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe," said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty in a welcome speech before Hawking's first talk as a researcher in Canada.

"There is no one who has done more to make physics accessible to everyday people."

A golden age for science in Canada?

"This is going to be a very, very unusual place," Perimeter director Neil Turok told CTV.ca in Waterloo, grinning as he spoke about the influx of high-profile researchers set to work at the Ontario in the coming months.

"If you stand on the corner here, you will see some pretty interesting people coming and going, from Nobel Prize winners to other brilliant scientists. When you have that happening, it's inevitable that discoveries will be made -- the culture of an institute like this is very important."

In addition to showing-off Hawking, the June 20 event was a chance for Perimeter to announce the creation of a slew of new distinguished visiting researcher postings. When the Institute's new Stephen Hawking Centre is completed next summer, Perimeter will house the largest concentration of theoretical physicists in the world.

Just days earlier, the Canadian government announced a $190 million initiative that has started to lure elite scientists to Canada from around the planet. Already among them are several researchers from institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, Hawking's alma mater.

Fifty years after the cancellation of the Arrow -- Canada's first and last venture into the supersonic fighter jet market -- Canada is again becoming a hotbed of innovation, buoyed by a strong economy and a big push from both the government and the private sector.

Reverse-brain-drain explained

Canada really got in the game a decade ago, when RIM founder Mike Lazaridis helped create Perimeter with a series of donations to the institute and nearby University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing -- totalling a quarter-billion-dollars to-date.

It's that sort of private-sector infusion that has jump-started everything from physics innovation in Canada to the next stage of corporate spaceflight worldwide cutting edge advances that are attracting some of the world's brightest.

"There are special places and times when great things can happen," said Lazaridis during Hawking's welcome. "It happened in 1905 (referencing Albert Einstein’s key breakthroughs), and it will happen again."

Lazaridis hopes Hawking's research in Canada "will lead to real advances which will be admired and copied all over the world."

Canada joined the big-boys club for particle physics in 2003, when our first large-scale particle accelerator was constructed in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

True to the growing star-power of all-things-physics, the facility hosted its first writer-in-residence last year: Hugo-Award-Winning "Flash Forward" author Robert Sawyer. As a result, the facility will serve as the setting for one of the celebrated sci-fi writer's upcoming books."

"Mad geniuses" on time-delay for changing the world

"People don't often appreciate the direct link between this very intellectual work and eventually technologies that become important in everyday life," said Turok, as Hawking posed with fans on the stage after his speech.

"These kind of mad geniuses like Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg worked in very ordinary conditions, toiling away at underfunded universities, often underappreciated. But their intellectual discoveries are the seeds for new technologies which drive the future."

Such was the case with Einstein, who discovered the laws of emission and absorption of radiation that paved the way for the creation of lasers fifty years later. It wasn't for another 30 years, though, that the technology became commercialized in everyday items from media players to backup warning devices in automobiles.

"Science breakthroughs are unpredictable," Turok said. "The only route to keep these breakthroughs coming is to invest in young people who are driven by curiosity and who want to further that curiosity through research."

Hawking 101

Aside from tirelessly popularizing the world of physics (most successfully from an astronomical perspective), it can be a little tough to sort out what Stephen Hawking has actually done in plain English.

In the interest of showing what the world's greatest living scientist will bring to bear in Ontario, here's a crib sheet of the famed researcher's key discoveries:

  • Black holes emit radiation (until they exhaust their energy and evaporate);
  • Though black holes can merge together, they can never separate or decrease in size;
  • Space and time began with what could have been the Big Bang and will likely end in black holes, Hawking contends (based on Einstein's theory of relativity and work Hawking did with U.K. physicist Roger Penrose);
  • Wrote A Brief History of Time, clarifying complex theories (including a few of his own) on the nature and creation of the universe as we know it, for tens of millions of readers, surfers, and viewers (among other cameos, the book appears in a scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban;
  • Through talks, articles and non-literary popular works, helped the public understand hard-to-grasp ideas such as quantum mechanics (a branch of physics that describes how matter and energy behave on an atomic level) and why they're important to understanding where we came from.