As a teenager growing up in Toronto, Dick Bond read widely in his search for meaning and purpose - exploring everything from mathematics to human prehistory and ancient history.
That's when he came across One Two Three… Infinity by the physicist George Gamow, a book first published in 1947 that explored fundamental scientific concepts that included math, space-time, galaxies and the building blocks of life at the atomic scale.
It sparked his imagination.
"The title almost says it all, which is that you can understand the universe by mathematics," says Bond. "That's a concept that's really hard to believe, but it turns out to be essentially true."
We know it's true because he proved it. Bond spent the next five decades using math to essentially flesh out Gamow's cosmic story.
A University Professor in the David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophyics (CITA), Bond is a world-leading expert in cosmology who is best known for his work on the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the Big Bang. His predictions have helped scientists determine the universe's age, shape and composition - in effect, how it came to be.
While he has collected many awards over the years - including the 2006 Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering and the 2025 Shaw Prize in Astronomy - to this day he describes himself as simply "someone who is still trying to understand everything."
Challenging the skeptics
Ever since he was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, Bond has sought to better understand fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background - the "first light" released about 380,000 years after the Big Bang - and what they can tell us about the early universe. At the time, many were skeptical that these temperature variations could even be detected.
Bond and his collaborator George Efstathiou, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and the co-recipient of the Shaw Prize, built the theoretical framework and computer codes to model the information encoded in the first light. In effect, the pair was working ahead of the technology to tell researchers where to look and what to expect.
"Instead of having a cornucopia of theories, we were converging upon one theoretical framework and class of ideas," says Bond, who is cross-appointed to U of T's department of physics.
They were right.
Once the data was available through satellite observations and ground-based experiments, Bond and Efstathiou were able to determine what the universe is made of - its geometry, its age and the structure.
"We didn't just get there. We got there exquisitely," says Bond. "The remarkable thing is that one after another, it fell in place and we did learn what we said we might."
Bond's influence extends far beyond the cosmic microwave background - he has helped shape the very language of modern cosmology. He coined the terms "gastrophysics" (how gas in the universe transforms into planets, stars and everything else around us) and the "cosmic web" (the web of filaments and vast sheets of dark matter that give the universe its structure). The latter, he says, can be best understood by the idea that, thanks to gravity, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," meaning the denser regions pull in more matter while emptier regions hollow out further. The result is a structure in three-dimensions that looks, at the largest scale, like an enormous spider's web.
He has also played a key role in classifying dark matter as hot, warm, or cold - with cold, dark matter ultimately proving to dominate our universe.
A cosmic calling
After completing his undergraduate studies in math, physics and chemistry at U of T, Bond headed to the U.S. to the California Institute of Technology to attend graduate school, where he earned both master's and doctoral degrees. His PhD thesis supervisor was William Alfred Fowler, who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on theoretical and experimental studies of nuclear reactions in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe.
Bond went on to complete postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley before landing a faculty position Stanford University, where he was a professor of physics.
Despite his success south of the border, he returned to U of T in 1985 after being recruited by CIFAR (the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research), then just two years old, and the nascent Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), a nationally supported research centre based at the university. The decision would ultimately have a big impact on both the field and the estimated 200 postdoctoral researchers he and his CITA colleagues would help train in the years to come (it also afforded him the opportunity to join his mother, then in her 70s, on stage in Convocation Hall when she received a U of T degree).
Shortly after he returned to U of T, one of his first moves was to convene a major international meeting at CITA, bringing together cosmic microwave background theorists and experimentalists "It wasn't really a thing before then," he says. "It was kind of scattered. This brought all of the people together."
It was an early sign of the vision he would realize over the next two decades. As CITA's director from 1996 to 2006, Bond shaped the institute into what it is today: a place where theorists and experimentalists work side by side to answer some of the biggest, thorniest questions about the universe.
He says that CITA, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, has put Canada on the cosmology and astrophysics map.
"We have taken a subject which was not very well represented when CITA started - and now Canada is one of the major countries in the world doing research in theoretical astrophysics," he says. "That's quite a thing."
Coming full circle
As a mentor, Bond takes an engaged approach with his graduate students, offering direction and staying involved as each one progresses at their own pace. His goal is to push them towards independent thinking - developing the critical and creative skills he considers the most important part of graduate education.
"What I most value is if they push back and say, 'No, no, it might be this way.' That's the best possible thing that can happen," he says. "That's the only way that young people develop. It's when they can see how to see."
Thomas Morrison, a graduate student working with Bond on the early physics of the universe, says it took time to adjust to how Bond communicates. "It happens very quickly and it's a lot of information all at once," he says, comparing it to learning a new language.
"I think he's challenged me a lot to do things that are working at a deeper level than I otherwise would have. So, going beyond just scratching the surface and getting down to the root cause of things - that's given me a better understanding that I can apply more generally."
At 75, Bond says his best work is still ahead. He is thinking now about entropy and quantum information - a framework he believes can, under one set of principles, describe everything in the universe, from its smallest components to its largest structures.
He also plans to write a book on the subject - and he hopes that it has the same effect on others that Gamow's did on him.
"I had ambitions at the beginning of trying to understand everything," he says. "And I think I'm actually getting someplace."
