This Physics Pioneer Walked Away from It All
Inside the South London offices of Doppel, a wearable technology start-up, sandwiched into a single room on a floor between a Swedish coffee shop and a wig-making studio, CEO and quantum physicist Fotini Markopoulou is debating the best way to describe an off-switch.
Markopoulou and her three co-founders have gathered in convivial discomfort around a cluttered formica table and lean-to blackboard. They’re redesigning the features of their eponymous first device, which is due to be released in October. It’s a kind of elegant watch that sits on the inside of your wrist and delivers a regular, vibrating pulse. By mimicking a heartbeat, the Doppel helps regulate a person’s emotions and mental focus.
Swiveling in a chair, Markopoulou says she likes a “smothering” gesture—placing a palm over the face of the Doppel to turn it off—because it is intuitive and simple, and the term suggests the device is “alive.” “You could always murder it,” deadpans commercial director Jack Hooper. Head of technology Andreas Bilicki chimes in. “Why not ‘choke’ or ‘asphyxiate’?” The team throws around alternatives: “throttle”; “go to sleep, to sleep”; “turn your Doppel off, just like putting a blanket over a parrot’s cage.”
Markopoulou, 45, observes the banter with a half-smile. She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales. There are no airs about her, nor any indication that she’s 20 years older than the rest of the team. Markopoulou lives in Oxford but sleeps on design director Nell Bennett’s couch whenever she comes down to London.
After the meeting, Markopoulou and I walk downstairs to get a coffee. With the zeal of the reborn, she tells me how much she relishes the pleasures of making a product that people will use and pay for. “There is a very practical satisfaction to getting stuff done, whether it’s making something or selling something,” she says. “I do enjoy solving practical problems, like how to convince people Doppel’s a good idea, or how to get the right deal from an accountant.”
“Removing the person is the whole point of training as a scientist.”
It’s hard to see how these tasks could fully absorb Markopoulou. She is one of the most radical and fiercely creative theoretical physicists alive today, and a founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, where she was at the vanguard of quantum gravity. This is the branch of physics striving to unify the two most fundamental theories of the universe: general relativity, proposed by Einstein, and quantum mechanics.
Quantum theory describes the rowdy interactions of fundamental particles that govern many of the forces in the known universe—except gravity. Gravity is rendered beautifully predictable by general relativity, which envisions it as an effect of how the four dimensions of space and time curve in response to matter, like a piece of tarpaulin bending under a bowling ball. Quantum theory’s ability to predict the behavior of an electron in a magnetic field has been described as the most precisely tested phenomenon in the history of science. But putting it together with gravity has so far produced absurd mathematical results. It’s as if a soccer player and a tennis player were managing to carry on a game despite being ignorant of the opponent’s
