And in contrast to the popular culture photographs of theoretical physicists – scribbling solitarily away on blackboards, enveloped in clouds of chalk mud – Dr. Massey likes to work with individuals. In flip, individuals contemplate it crucial to talk his identify in the correct rooms. Lock a undertaking, and it's not lengthy earlier than one other drops in his lap. He additionally tends to inherit organizations that want some path – most just lately the Large Magellan, which is going through monetary turmoil.
Dr. Massey's involvement with the telescope undertaking got here towards the top of a presidency on the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. Throughout a gathering of the Board of the Woods Gap Marine Organic Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then the president of the College of Chicago, approached him to serve on the board of the Large Magellan. A 12 months later, Dr. Massey was elected president.
However amongst all his posts and accolades, one stands out, Dr. Massey stated. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse School, a traditionally black males's faculty in Atlanta and the positioning of Dr. King's funeral. “With out Morehouse,” he stated, “I wouldn't be who I’m.”
Torn Between Worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., through the top of segregation. Should you had been Black, he recalled, you sat within the balcony on the motion pictures, rode the bus again and slipped by way of the aspect entrances of shops—should you might store there. And when a white particular person was on the sidewalk, you moved out of the way in which.
Determined to go away, he was delighted when, at 16, he received a scholarship to attend Morehouse. However he quickly realized that his classmates had been watched by the individuals of Mississippi. “And so I stated, 'I'll present them,'” stated Dr. Massey. “What's the toughest course?” He selected physics as a result of he felt he had one thing to show.
In a consortium of 4 schools, he was the one pupil in his 12 months learning physics. However he was by no means alone. Quite the opposite, he cherished misplaced in equations. Years later, in his memoirs, Dr. Massey described a “complete absorption that’s as near a meditative state as I ever achieved.”
He took that zeal right into a doctoral program at Washington College in St. Louis, the place he studied how liquid helium behaved close to absolute zero levels. In 1966, he earned his Ph.D., becoming a member of a cohort of greater than a dozen black physicists throughout the nation who had carried out the identical feat.
Quickly after, Dr. Massey moved to Chicago to work on the close by Argonne Nationwide Laboratory, learning the unusual conduct of sound waves in superfluid helium, which appeared to defy the legal guidelines of physics. His work attracted the eye of researchers at Urbana-Champaign in addition to Anthony Leggett, a theorist on the College of Sussex in England whose information of helium would later win him a Nobel Prize in Physics.
