And in contrast to pop-culture portrayals of theoretical physicists — solitarily scribbling away on blackboards, enveloped in clouds of chalk mud — Dr. Massey likes operating with other people. In flip, other people regard him extremely sufficient to talk his identify in the correct rooms. He wraps up one challenge, and it isn’t lengthy earlier than every other drops in his lap. He additionally tends to inherit organizations in want of a few route — maximum just lately the Giant Magellan, which faces monetary turmoil.
Dr. Massey’s involvement with the telescope challenge got here towards the top of a presidency on the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During a board assembly for the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then the president of the University of Chicago, approached him about serving at the Giant Magellan’s board. One 12 months later, Dr. Massey used to be elected chair.
But amongst all of his posts and accolades, one sticks out, Dr. Massey mentioned. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse College, a traditionally Black males’s faculty in Atlanta and the website of Dr. King’s funeral. “Without Morehouse,” he mentioned, “I just wouldn’t be who I am.”
Torn Between Worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., all the way through the peak of segregation. If you had been Black, he recalled, you sat within the balcony at motion pictures, rode buses within the again and slipped throughout the facet entrances of retail outlets — if you must store there in any respect. And when a white individual used to be at the sidewalk, you moved out of the way in which.
Desperate to depart, he used to be elated when, at 16, he gained a scholarship to wait Morehouse. But he briefly discovered that his classmates regarded down on other people from Mississippi. “And so I said, ‘I’ll show them,’” Dr. Massey mentioned. “What’s the hardest course?” He selected physics as a result of he felt he had one thing to end up.
Across a consortium of 4 faculties, he used to be the one pupil in his 12 months learning physics. But he used to be by no means lonely. On the opposite, he cherished getting misplaced in equations. Years later, in his memoir, Dr. Massey described a “total absorption that is as close to a meditative state as I have ever achieved.”
He rode that zeal right into a doctoral program at Washington University in St. Louis, the place he studied how liquid helium behaved close to absolute 0 levels. In 1966, he earned his Ph.D., becoming a member of a cohort of greater than a dozen Black physicists around the country who had achieved the similar feat.
Soon after, Dr. Massey moved to Chicago to paintings on the within sight Argonne National Laboratory, learning the peculiar habits of sound waves in superfluid helium, which looked as if it would defy the regulations of physics. His paintings stuck the eye of researchers at Urbana-Champaign in addition to Anthony Leggett, a theorist on the University of Sussex in England whose working out of helium would later win him a Nobel Prize in Physics.
