WATERLOO - Prof. Stephen Hawking appeared via video from Cambridge, UK, Saturday. Hawking, 67 the best-known cosmologist of our time, is still recovering from a chest infection that forced him to cancel a trip to Canada earlier this year. During a video connect, Hawking announced that he's looking forward to “spend a month at Perimeter next year”.

At the event, a emotional Mike Lazaridis, also gave an indication of what's the future holds while commenting on the previous 10 years of the PI, which is celebrating a decade of thinking with the Quantum to Cosmos Festival, stating to the audience that "the best is yet to come”.

Through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), a total of $10 million, was added to the hundred of millions Mike Lazaridis has put in, along with the City of Waterloo. The newly named Stephen Hawking Centre at the Perimeter Institute which falls under the Leading Edge Fund. The fund is designed to engage new discoveries and technologies that will keep Canada competitive. Both Ottawa and Ontario had previously announced multimillion-dollar grants for the new wing, and cabinet ministers from both levels of government attended Saturday's announcement. A new $400-million fundraising campaign to support Perimeter's future needs was also announced.

PI director Neil Turok and a former colleague of Hawking at the University of Cambridge in Britain explained the direction of the new centre at PI in a recent statement, “We are trying to create conditions like those in ancient Greece, which saw the flowering of ideas because people looked at the world with new eyes.”