And in contrast to pop-culture portrayals of theoretical physicists — solitarily scribbling away on blackboards, enveloped in clouds of chalk mud — Dr. Massey likes working with folks. In flip, folks regard him extremely sufficient to talk his title in the proper rooms. He wraps up one venture, and it isn’t lengthy earlier than one other drops in his lap. He additionally tends to inherit organizations in want of some route — most just lately the Large Magellan, which faces monetary turmoil.
Dr. Massey’s involvement with the telescope venture got here towards the top of a presidency on the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. Throughout a board assembly for the Woods Gap Marine Organic Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then the president of the College of Chicago, approached him about serving on the Large Magellan’s board. One 12 months later, Dr. Massey was elected chair.
However amongst all of his posts and accolades, one stands out, Dr. Massey mentioned. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse School, a traditionally Black males’s faculty in Atlanta and the location of Dr. King’s funeral. “With out Morehouse,” he mentioned, “I simply wouldn’t be who I’m.”
Torn Between Worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., through the peak of segregation. Should you had been Black, he recalled, you sat within the balcony at motion pictures, rode buses within the again and slipped by means of the aspect entrances of shops — when you may store there in any respect. And when a white particular person was on the sidewalk, you moved out of the best way.
Determined to go away, he was elated when, at 16, he gained a scholarship to attend Morehouse. However he shortly realized that his classmates seemed down on folks from Mississippi. “And so I mentioned, ‘I’ll present them,’” Dr. Massey mentioned. “What’s the toughest course?” He selected physics as a result of he felt he had one thing to show.
Throughout a consortium of 4 schools, he was the one pupil in his 12 months learning physics. However he was by no means lonely. Quite the opposite, he cherished getting misplaced in equations. Years later, in his memoir, Dr. Massey described a “whole absorption that’s as near a meditative state as I’ve ever achieved.”
He rode that keenness 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 completed 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 caught the eye of researchers at Urbana-Champaign in addition to Anthony Leggett, a theorist on the College of Sussex in England whose understanding of helium would later win him a Nobel Prize in Physics.
