Balancing paper plates of Jamaican chicken and salad are two dozen or so individuals, mostly male in their mid-20s to mid-30s and mostly somewhat scruffy. A few chat about commonplace matters, like soaring gas prices and the rain forecast that scuppered a planned September outing to Toronto Island for this picnic.

But most of the conversation features words like cosmic web, dark energy, first light, baryons, superstrings, dark matter, microwave background, weak lensing, cosmological constant, power spectrums and anthropic, as well as numbers that are very, very big or very, very small.