Sylvester James Gates, Jr.

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ORAL HISTORIES

Credit: John Thomas Consoli, University of Maryland

Interviewed by

David Zierler

Interview dates

July 30 and August 3, 2020

Location

Video conference

See catalog record for this interview.

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Interview of Sylvester James Gates, Jr. by David Zierler on July 30 and August 3, 2020,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46941

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Abstract

Interview with Sylvester James Gates, Jr., Ford Foundation Professor of Physics and Director of the Theoretical Physics Center at Brown University. Gates discusses his preparations to lead the APS and the value of his service for PCAST for this new role. Gates recounts his family heritage and he discusses his father’s military service and the death of his mother. He explains how his family navigated racist challenges during his upbringing in El Paso and then in Orlando and how he navigated his own intellectual abilities in school. Gates explains his interest in physics in high school and the opportunities that led to his admission at MIT for his undergraduate work. He recounts the many mentors who made a positive impression on him and he explains his realization that his specialty would be at the boundary between math and physics. Gates describes his earliest interactions with string theory and he explains his decision to remain at MIT for his graduate work to work with Jim Young on supersymmetry. He paints a broader picture of supergravity research at this time and the rising importance of computers for this work. Gates describes his postdoctoral research at Harvard as a Junior Fellow, where he worked closely with Warren Siegel, and he describes his decision to join the faculty at MIT after a subsequent postdoctoral position at Caltech. He addresses Shelly Glashow’s criticism of string theory, and he explains his decision to leave MIT for a faculty position at the University of Maryland. Gates reflects on his teaching and mentoring career at Maryland, he describes his time at Howard University, and he discusses the broader issue of diversity in physics and AIP’s TEAM-UP Report. He describes his more recent interests in graph theory and the broader effort to unify gravity with the other forces. Gates reflects on how he became an advisor to President Obama for PCAST and how he worked with John Holdren to translate reports into policy changes. He explains his decision to go emeritus at Maryland and to take a new position at Brown, and why joining the Watson Institute was an attractive part of the offer. Gates reflects on assuming leadership at APS during the twin crises of Covid and racial strife, he surveys the state of string theory and high energy physics, and he explains why supersymmetry might offer a path to understanding dark matter. At the end of the interview, Jim conveys his hope that his work in math will yield deep insights into nature, and he considers the possibility of pursuing an autobiographical project.

I am grateful to a number of PCAST colleagues for their enormous guidance to help me grow in this direction. Among these people to whom I especially owe a debt of gratitude are John Holdren, Eric Lander, Shirley Jackson, Admed Zwail, Craig Mundie, William Press, and Eric Schmidt in their leadership positions as well as Rosina Bierbaum, Chad Mirkin, Mark Gorenberg, Barbara Schaal, Chris Chyba, Dan Schrag, and Wanda Austin for so many thoughtful interactions.

It was very rewarding because on PCAST, we did an arc of studies on STEM education as that was one of my primary portfolios, so on every single one of those studies, I would talk to primary domain experts, authors, etc. and therefore, I always thought, “That if it fails, someone gets the finger pointed at them and that would be me as a lead author.”

But I also was amazed at the fact that I have now done some things in life that actually impacted my whole country. I mean, there are in all the books now the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—there are parts of that act that look like they came out of some of the reports I led. So I like to tell people, “Remember that Schoolhouse Rock episode about how a bill becomes a law? I have now sort of lived that.” That’s really a strange thing for a physicist to do. And so that public policy experience has definitely fed into my approach to thinking about the presidency of the American Physical Society, and I think it actually has already had a substantial impact. However, there were other reports on which I was not one of the lead authors and the one on electromagnetic spectrum (wifi) allocation, led by Mark Gorenberg, was one I appreciate having been able to contribute.

As you probably know, in this year of 2020, the American Physical Society cancelled its March meeting. This is traditionally the first major meeting of each year with upwards of 10,000 people from all over the globe who would have on descended Denver, Colorado during the first week of March. At the very last minute, the APS executive leadership and corporate board cancelled that meeting. There were already people in transit, there were already some people who had arrived in the city from destinations around the world, and we cancelled the meeting on a Saturday evening becoming the first major professional organization to do so. Later I was to learn from professionals in the meeting planning industry this had an unexpected, at least to us, impact on many other professional organizations.

There was a phone conference with all of the leadership (about thirty people) that began at 9:30 pm EDT on 29 February to bring all the responsible leaders into the discussion under the behest of Dr. Kate Kirby, APS CEO. This would be final step in a “no/no-go” process that would conclude at process that had actually already started a week ago. The reason the schedule call was held as there had been an increasingly urgent discussion and debate that entire preceding week about the dangers of holding the conference.

My father’s name was Sylvester James Gates, Sr. He was born in Alabama. The nearest large town — and I use “large” figuratively — was a place called Minden. Dad’s father, my grandfather, was a sugarcane farmer. My dad was born in 1925 to Joseph and Annie Gates in the town of Myrtlewood in Marengo County where the county seat was Linden, Alabama. Annie was of mixed heritage, native American (Creek) and African American. During the last few years my younger sister, Sylvia, has done a fair amount of genealogical on-line investigation and traced some of our family’s roots back to prior to the Civil War. In my forties, one day it dawned on me that my father was actually an incredible man. I often tell people—many times people have applauded the things I have been able to do in life, and I say, “Oh, that was easy. I just picked the right dad.”

Of course, that’s not a choice I had anything to do with, but my father was an incredible person. But so was my grandfather, it turns out. So as we will probably get to later, I have actually been interested in science since I was four years old, and part of that—as I reflect upon that coming from the way that I was raised, but then I began to go back and think about questions that I got about use of intellect and logic and mathematics, that I could identify it in my childhood coming to me from my father, not by preaching, but by example.

Near the Battle of the Bulge Memorial at Lake Eola in Orlando, a brick bears the following inscription, “S.J.Gates, Sr., S/SGT Q.M. TRK., Red Ball Expr.” The brick and inscription (standing for Staff Sergeant, Quarter Master Truck, Red Ball Express) are a small symbol of the story of a young man who, at age twelve, told his father, Joseph, he would seek a better life than one most likely afforded a black southern farmer in a milieu ruled by ethnic bigotry and racial terrorism. How did a twelve-year-old boy come to possess that kind of courage, sense of perspective and awareness? I don't know. Previously, I have described my relationship with my father and his absolutely critical role in my becoming a scientist in a book entitled Technology and the Dream: Reflections of the Black Experience at MIT, 1941-1999 (M.I.T. Press, 2001), by Dr. C. G. Williams. Metaphorically, the brick described above has an even greater significance to me. It represents a foundation laid for my life.

My father never finished high school, but as a child, I remember watching him learning trigonometry and some beginning calculus as he studied for his high school equivalency. And he had an extraordinary regard for education. You often hear the stories of—especially of African American families—where people say, “How did you get interested in higher education?” Well in my case, it was very simple. When all of my siblings and I began school, in the evenings we would have dinner together as a family. I had three siblings, a mother, dad—and dad’s question was almost always, “So have you figured out what college you’re going to?” And that’s just the from the earliest grades. And I was sort of thinking, “College? What is that? Grade 13?” I knew that there were grades after 12 but I had never heard of anything more beyond that.

Zierler:

Did your father grow up on the farm?

Gates:

My father did grow up on a farm, at least partially. Up until age ten or twelve, he lived with his mother in a nearby town, but afterwards he moved to the farm. This was in a time of course when segregation in the south was rigorously enforced — the terror of Ku Klux Klan and all that was associated with theories and practice of racial supremacy were part of my father’s life. His father, Joseph Gates actually owned land according to our family’s stories which distinguished him from many African American families who were would sharecroppers, that is working land owned by someone else.

Also, he was unusual in the family stories in another way—and with current experiences across many families’ lives—we’ve come to regard family stories as more reliable than before. My grandfather apparently could do simple arithmetic, although he could neither read nor write. It was a very practical skill, according to family stories because it was a typical situation in the south that there were a lot of very impoverished African American farmers and families. It was impossible for African Americans to own businesses. The people who owned businesses are all European Americans in towns, and anyone familiar with an agrarian life knows that farmers and their families often have to borrow to buy seed and implements, and those debts were paid back when crops come in.

There were books kept by the storekeepers tracking the debts. Sometimes disagreements would occur over what the ledgers indicated were owed. The family stories are that people on both sides of this divide would take my grandfather’s skill at ‘cyphering’ as a method to reach some resolution of disagreements. And so the statement is my grandfather could ‘cipher.’ He could neither read nor write, but he could do arithmetic.

This clearly made an impression on my father about the importance of education because he always said he wanted all four of his children to have the opportunity to go to college. Specifically, his words were, “Get your education because that is something no one can take from you.”

Zierler:

Jim, what opportunity did your father not have himself to pursue higher education?

Gates:

Sure. With my dad, in 1941 or 1942, he joined the US Army. He had to lie about his age, as did his father, and there’s this expression that most people may not recognize this, it was called “putting up your age,” which means to tell a recruiter that you’re older than you actually are. So they “put up” his age so he could get in…weighing all of one-hundred and twenty-seven pounds. This was just two points more than enough for him not to be declared 4-F, unfit for service. And again, the family stories were that part of the reason he had to do that was out of fear of his life because he had worked in an icehouse. Most people don’t know what an icehouse is these days, but they had ice houses back then and one day, one of the people who was in a supervisory position, again, a young European-American man, was trying to show off with some young woman and he was telling her that he could kick any of the N-word workers and they wouldn’t do anything. And he said that to my father, and my father apparently said, “If you do that to me, he could find this ice pick inside of, somewhere.”

And so that meant my father’s life was at risk at that point because that’s not the kind of thing a young, African American man living in the south in the 1920s and 30s — you wouldn’t these days unfortunately — if you’re in a rural situation, that puts your life at risk. The stories are that part of the reason why he joined the army was to make sure that he could survive, that he could live. So he joined the army. He spent not quite 28 consecutive years because he though he went into the army at ’42, he got out actually in ’48, something I only recently learned about. Prior to learning this, I thought he had been in continuously. But he got out only for about one or two years working as a porter on railroads. One day in a conversation with an older porter, he was asked what he had done before working on the railroad and responded he had been in the Army and World War II. The older man responded that dad’s best bet would be to re rejoin the army where he remained until he retired completely in 1967.

His early life, was spent going from farm, joining the Army, (while stationed in the San Antonio area getting married to Charlie Anglin before), going off to war where he served for 13 months in the European Theater of Operations as it was known technically. He was a driver for an organization called the ‘Red Ball Express.’ The ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ was an African American group of flyers. The ‘Red Ball,’ consisting essentially of African American soldiers, was the supply arm of General Patton’s Army as they rolled across western Europe, pushing back the forces of Nazism and fascism. One can actually read about the Red Ball in many places though it is not as famous as the Airmen. But in the African American community of Orlando, I learned about both and other similar groups like the black tank units.

I mean, our society now knows a lot about these folks, but when I was growing up, you had to be in the African American community to actually hear about Tuskegee Airmen or the Red Ball Express. My father was a Red Ball Express driver following his life as a farm boy. I look at my father’s life, and I’m actually amazed because his father, having possession of land, wanted to pass that as a legacy for his son. Grandfather also possessed a reputation as a hard-working person who once reputed said, “People don’t mind being around people who know how to work hard.” My father also had a half-brother, unfortunately my uncle died relatively young, so there was only my father.

No, I don’t think—well, maybe at first, but I don’t think that lasted very long. Yes, there was the story my father told me about why he went into the Army partially preserve his life, potentially, but also when he got in the Army, because he was a good student, he was what I think of as a contemplative personality, namely you put someone in a situation, they don’t just react. They actually think about where they are.

And one story that my father told me once or twice was that the thing that really got him thinking seriously about being a good soldier was talking to an older African American soldier who actually had been a Buffalo Soldier when he was young. You know, they were one of these groups of black cavalrymen in the west. So, some of those guys were still around when my dad joined the US Army.

And he said this one guy, I don’t know the gentleman’s name, he engaged in a conversation was really impressive with and said something like, “Young man, read and learn and remember the US Army regulation booklet because if you go by those rules, you have the potential to go far.” And this one conversation, as I said, my father was a good student, reading was something he actually liked to do. I don’t know if he had a taste for reading regulations, but apparently he did it.

Dad seemed to have been promoted pretty regularly which is another sign that he exercised a high degree of performance and discipline. Other stories involved his adroit driving handling of a “deuce and a half” (i.e. a two-and-one-half ton six-by-six cargo truck). Finally, there is one of my favorites that showed his analytical skills on maneuvers. He was in a jeep with an officer (as essentially African American officers did not exist) this other person was not black. The office wonder when the task force he was leading would me a second such force. Dad took out his map, looked at his watch, did a quick calculation in his head and said, “We should see them in about twelve minutes, sir.” After it happened as he predicted, the office was surprised and complimented him on his mental abilities.

So from that story, I intuited that pretty early on in my father’s service in the US Army, he found it a place where he felt secure, and even though it was a segregated army, there were rules. And that’s a most important thing that there are rules and people on both sides of the racial divide agree that they’re going to abide by those rules. And so that made it someplace where he actually could thrive as a person.

Zierler:

In a way, that perhaps in Alabama, there were not rules that would have governed the kinds of incidents that he had to get away from.

Gates:

That’s right. There were rules in book, but not rules about reality, whereas in the Army, it seemed to him those rules existed in reality. One other thing I will say about my father. I am my father’s product, I mean, so let me go on just a little bit longer. Some years ago I did an interview on C-SPAN with Brian Lamb and about two or three weeks after that, I got an email message out of the blue. A gentleman had said he had seen the interview and he sort of congratulated me on it, and then he said, “Are you the son of Sylvester Gates who was a soldier at Fort Bliss in the early 60s?” And I wrote back, “Yes.” And then I got an email message back saying, “Your father,” in the 30 years that this gentleman has served in the Army, “your father was the most impressive soldier I ever met the entire time I was in with the Army.”

Zierler:

Wow.

Gates:

And then another indication of my father’s performance as a soldier was that he was among the first 50 or 100 African Americans promoted to become what’s called an E-10, a Sergeant Major which is the highest enlisted rank in the US Army. My father had a reputation of being a superb trainer of young soldiers on Fort Bliss’s base, and he was known as such up and down the chain of command on that post. By the way, I did not realize it then, but Ft. Bliss is only about one-hundred and fifty miles from Trinity Site, the location of the first atomic bomb test in history that took place in New Mexico during World War II.

When my mother died, the Commanding General flew a color guard to my mother’s funeral in San Antonio. Fort Bliss is in El Paso, that’s about five hundred and seventy miles away, but that says something about the regard the Commanding General had for my father and what my father had done because while my mother was dying of cancer — it was about a two year long period — my father raised four children all by himself while he was on active duty.

Zierler:

It is high praise what your father’s colleagues said about him in terms of his service. What do you think he learned over the course of his career and the characteristics that he had built among himself for him to be regarded in this way by his peers and superiors?

Gates:

You know, I often tell people that my father was the quintessential soldier. That meant he ran the household like it was part of the Army. [laugh] From those experiences, I can intuit some things about him. He was a disciplinarian, as a father. It is funny to me now that later in my life, my father became one of my closest friends. As a child, I could never imagine my dad being a friend. [augh] He set the rules and, you know, you followed them. Corporal punishment was not out of the realm of possibilities in my household as a child.

It was really funny; Dad was hard in the way of setting standards and trying to draw the best character out of his children that he could. I remember he always demanded that you work to your utmost ability to accomplish what you said you were going to do. That was a primary lesson. He also had extraordinarily high regard for intellectual accomplishment and achievement. In other words, Grade A was the expected norm. Anything other than that could get you in trouble.

But the really weird thing about my dad, as I reflect on him, he was a strict disciplinarian and all the things that a lot of people experienced from military dads. I told you he raised us by himself for about two years, but earlier than that I had an experience with my father that led me to never doubt how much my father loved me. And that was when I was learning to ride a bicycle, and there was some old, abandoned airfields around Fort Bliss that had been left over from the Second World War. My father, on consecutive Sundays, every Sunday, took me just the two of us, out to one of these airfields so that I could learn to ride my bicycle. I knew that his work during the week was long and difficult, but here he was running along next to his son trying [to] teach him how not to fall off between his work weeks.

I never had the sense that dad, even though he was strict, I never had the sense that there was an absence of love there because my dad did so many things that proved he was a typical, I guess, man of the 1950s. Men in the 1950s didn’t tell their children they loved them. They showed them that they loved them. My dad was a typical dad like that, and he listened to his children in a way that, as I reflect on it now, I didn’t understand it then, but he listened to his children in a way that I find extraordinary, and in fact, led to my becoming a scientist. His strength through the times of my mother illness to death, and my attending six different elementary schools (Hughey, Travis, Fort Bliss, Logan, Fannin, and Hannibal in three cities and two states) was sustaining. I attempted to describe the experience of being his son at his memorial service in 2007 by the delivery at his eulogy “An Allegorical-Elegy for A Sergeant-Major,” a bit of prose I created.

Before living in El Paso, and Fort Bliss in the desert, when I four years old, I lived in Canada with dad and my mom and my siblings. Our family would not return to the continental United States until 22 May 1956 arriving on an airplane called a “C-119 flying boxcar.” The plane took off from Harmon Field in Newfoundland and landed at McGuire Field in New Jersey having transported all six members of the Gates family and four other military personnel.

My youngest brother was about to be born in a few months as we boarded the ship, I believed sailed from New York, that conveyed us to St. John, Newfoundland in Canada. The nearby Fort Pepperrell we to be out home for four years.

When I ask people, “Do you know where is the location of Newfoundland?” Most people say, “No.” I said, “Well, you’ve probably heard of Nova Scotia. Go there and then head north and east and you’ll get to Newfoundland.” It is cold and dank. It is one of the Canadian Maritime provinces and in 1954 or so, my mother took her then three children to see a science fiction movie named Spaceways. Somewhere toward the middle of the decade between 2010 and 2020, I was able to track it after about a ten year-long on-line search. From this movie, I first heard the word “science,” in it I first saw astronauts. As portrayed in the movie, science to me was a doorway to have adventure and fun. It just seemed an amazing life. What four-year-old boy would not be attracted to adventure and fun?

So at four years old that evening, (I have no recollection of this), but I heard the story from dad when he came home, I wanted to explain to him how rockets worked. And he sat and listened. An irony of this was a few years later and toward the entire end of his career, he worked with rockets (the “Hawk” missile – the predecessor of the Patriot missile, Nike Ajax and Mike Hercules missiles) battalion and artillery. I do not know if he had the same interest, however, his listening was to have important implications for my path to becoming a scientist. And that’s emblematic of dad because from ages four to about eight, I had tons of questions about everything. The person I would ask was my father. And I had a recollection that he answered every single question no matter how odd it was.

When I was in my 40s or so, it occurred to me how odd that fact was and maybe my childhood recollections weren’t accurate. On one of my visits to my father’s then home in the Orlando area where he spent the last 30 years of his life, he lived in a small, famous African American town called Eatonville, FL. It was incorporated in six miles north of Orlando during 1887, one of the nation’s first African American self-governing cities. As county and local police authorities then often refused to protect African American citizens in these times, such communities sprang up in many places in the United States in order to protect themselves. This community exists to this day in 2020.

On this visit I asked “Dad, do you remember me asking questions?” His response was, “Yes.” I next said “Do you remember answering all of the questions?” He said, “Sure, yes.” And I said, “How did you do that?” I knew my dad never finished high school but earned a high school equivalency degree while at Fort Bliss and also in 1957 earned a Certificate of Award from the US School of Music after our family’s arrival there.

And then he told me something that astounded me, he says, “Well, I remember you asking the questions. But there’s something you don’t remember.” And I’m like, “Well what is that?” He said, “If you had a question that I could not answer, what I would do is to tell you was “hold on.” In the intervening time I would go read, I would go ask someone, and then the next day I would come and give you the answer.” And that got me used to the idea that when you have questions, there are answers that can be obtained—a key foundational part of a scientific personality. And that came from my dad. As I said before, this came not by him telling me, but by learning this from his example.

There were other things he did that supported my blossoming interest in science—when I was in second grade, I was having difficult learning to read. Arithmetic, by the way, was no problem. This is a trait in my family that I’ve now seen for four generations from granddad to my father to me to my children and to relatives —I mean to nieces and nephews also. All of us seem to have this liking for mathematics and we’re pretty good at it. I tell people, “Mathematics is the family business.”

Since I was having trouble learning to read, my reading teacher suggested that dad should go get some books about something in which I already had an interested. This was around age seven or eight. He remembered his four-year-old son had an interest in rockets, rockets and space travel, so he brought home some books by an author named Willie and from those books, I basically learned to read very quickly after that. But it also reignited my interest in space, which is the old four-year-old rocket thing, right? The books also got me to thinking about how big the universe must be for those tiny dots of light in the sky to be places to which one could go.

So dad did that. He also brought home a ‘Universal Map of Outer Space’ by the Rand McNally company. It was one of my prized childhood possessions in early grade school levels! He had listened and recalled what was inside of my head and heart, this interest in science and space and what have you, and then he took concrete steps to nurture it. I never heard him say anything special about this, but he kept on doing these things.

Zierler:

Jim, your father as a soldier par excellence suggests, of course, both a high level of patriotism and a great respect for authority, and so I wonder how he might have navigated those kinds of feelings and also convey that he was raising children in a society that suffered from systemic racism?

Gates:

Well, one of the things that most Americans certainly your age and younger have not been informed about is that actually, in the 1950s, the military was one of the few places in our society where diversity — even before the word existed — where diversity was actually the norm. And so the kinds of exhibitions of racial animus and hatred that most African American children of my age experience in their lives were absent from my childhood because my father was in the Army. This awareness would come later after my mother’s death on 27 March of 1962. About a year later, he remarried, and I gained a stepmother, Edythe Bradshaw Gates. She was an elementary school teacher in the Orlando area and we then lived in a segregated southern city, somewhat improved over the conditions my dad encountered as a child. But my encounters with racism did not begin there.

Because I had no clue. So the US military in the 50s was a cocoon—and I’ve talked to a few other African Americans who have had similar experiences with dads in the service in that decade — and my story is not unusual in this way. It also meant that I started school in integrated schools and I was always one of the best one or two students in all of my classes after learning to read. So I never had a chance as a young African American to onboard mythologies about lack of intelligence because I was and am a person of color who out-performed essentially all of my classmates no matter then ethnicity in my class constantly.

So that’s a failure mode that I often see in young African Americans now because no matter how much lip service is paid to the idea of the equality of human beings, this society is rife and full of messages for African American young people and the messages say that, “You are less when it comes to the exercise of your inherent intellectual ability.” And so as a young child, I never had a chance to onboard that because my father was in an environment where that was not tolerated.

Zierler:

And probably you were lucky enough to avoid a lot of the trauma that so many of your contemporaries who didn’t have that experience had to contend with.

Gates:

Yes. I believe that’s also the case. I should tell you that my life started to change when I was in fifth grade, my biological mother died. So, at around age 12, I went from having friends of diverse ethnic backgrounds to — well, it is a little bit more complicated. There was a transitional period while my biological mother was dying, I lived in San Antonio for about a year or so, but prior to that — because we had lived on Army posts — I had been just one of the kids among a sea of kids — most of whom were European American — there were occasionally some Asian American kids and some Hispanic American kids, right—so we were just all together. During the time in San Antonio, I went to Fannin Elementary School on Houston St. Prior to this, our family had always been among the handful of people of color in the communities in which we lived. This changed in the neighbor around Fannin which is less than two miles from the Alamo. The number of European American families decreased and here was an increase in the number of Mexican American families and African American families.

When I look back to my time living at El Paso, I think we were sort of like Spanky and the Gang from the old 1920s and 30s movies. That’s what we were. And none of us—I don’t recall a single incident in that period of my life around being attacked because I was the only black kid in the crowd. Not a single incident. But when we moved to Orlando, things changed radically.

As I said, my stepmother lived in a segregated community, the historical part of Orlando now called ‘the Parramore District’. That meant that I lived in a segregated community. But that also had a particular development because of the absence of European Americans, you never had direct unpleasant events around race because there are only black people. However, what I then encountered was the — well it is something that Einstein said, but I encountered in real life so to speak — Einstein once said that one of the terrible things about segregation is that those who are segregated against often come to believe what is said about them by those who enforce the conditions that segregate them. What I started to encounter in my life in Orlando was the indirect uploading of these terrible apps that sit in the heads of many African Americans because of the extent to which our society supports racist theories of ethnic superiority vs. ethnic inferiority.

And it was very clear to me right after I moved to Orlando, because I was finishing up my sixth grade year—my stepmother was teaching at a school in Winter Park, so the four of us would get in the car, along with my stepmom, and she would drive us to school, and you know she’s a new mom so she goes from zero kids to having four. So you have to think about that transition, right? But one day — I went to a school called Hannibal Elementary and one day while I was there maybe three weeks or a month or so after we first got there, we were at recess and there was a young African American fellow student of mine in my class named Michael and we were playing and he stopped and we were talking, he said, “You know, you’re really pretty good at this school stuff.” And I said, “Well, thank you.” Because I didn’t know what else to say. And then he said something which I’ve never forgotten. He said, “No matter how smart you are, you can never be smart as a white kid. You will always be two years behind.”

Now, my reaction to that—and I remember it because it was so stunning — I didn’t know what he was saying. Because of my life experience — remember, I’m coming from an integrated environment where I’m always the top one or two students in the class, and so he’s suddenly saying something that is inconsistent with my life experience.

Zierler:

It simply did not compute for you.

Gates:

Exactly. Literally, it did not compute. And so, I remember just sort of standing there trying to figure out what it was he was saying to me because I couldn’t. And then finally I did — I don’t know whether it took 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, but eventually I figured out what he was saying and I understood immediately it was the result of the fact that he and so many other kids like him never had interactions with European American students and students of other races so that they could get a realistic view their own intellectual capacity of in comparison to others. If you’re in a segregated environment, you have no basis for comparison, and when you encounter these ubiquitous messages in a society, you might begin to say, “Well, gee, there must be something to that.”

My time in Orlando turned out to have been an extraordinarily valuable time in my life because it prepared me for our society as it is, not that cocoon that I had been raised in up to that point. I sometimes tell people, jokingly, I had to switch from loving the music of the Beach Boys to loving the music of The Temptations. And one of the things that—although it is sort of a joke, it is not completely a joke — because of the trajectory of my life having been in six different schools — I had acquired a working understanding of the difference between culture and ethnicity. Any kid who moved to a many of school would understand this. Moving to a different school means necessarily one encounters a different school culture. Having had to navigate this pathway, I continued to do so.

One of the things I remember learning from that experience was that the rules for playing games actually change depending on where you were. Now I look back and think of this as my first awakening to what culture is because for a kid, culture is a lot around the games you play. And if the games are different and we change the environment, you have to learn to change to play by the new rules, otherwise you’re cheating, right?

I began to understand that culture is actually a negotiation. That it is not really, as a lot of people think, that race and culture are the same thing, and from those early experiences I understood that was never true, nor ever likely to be true.

When I arrived in Orlando, I had all of the resources to negotiate the environment in which I found myself, but I also came to understand the toxicity and the unfairness and the immorality of how racism plays out in this country. For those who against who discrimination and segregation are existent, it is like being forced to swim constantly in a pool of acid or as a terrible miasma against which there is no possibility of a hermetic isolation.

Another time this was starkly brought to my attention was a few years later, probably in 11th grade or so. A friend of mine named Phillip Dunn, who I met when we were in ninth grade, formed a chess team (that I wickedly named “Le Noir Chevaliers et Ajax”). We first started playing chess in ninth grade when he began to teach me. We were serious chess players. Eventually we attracted a group of other guys watching us. “Hey, that’s not checkers. What are you guys doing?” By the time we were in tenth or eleventh grade we decided to form a chess team. We got one of the teachers, my physics teacher, to be a sponsor. And we challenged high schools in Orlando.

I have vivid memories of the last time I saw my mother. This was at Fort Sam Houston, a military base in the San Antonio area which has an excellent hospital. My father had gotten transferred from Fort Bliss to Fort Sam Houston for my mother to get medical treatment.

And like I said, I have a vivid memory of the last time I saw mom. We went to the hospital. We were not even allowed in the hospital since we were children. I was 11 and a half, my brother was 10 and a half, my sister was 9 and a half, and my youngest brother was 7 and a half. We were not even allowed in the hospital. So on this final occasion of seeing mother, she was on a gurney. Some attendants rolled her outside and we saw her.

At first, I didn’t recognize mom. Her physical appearance had changed so much, and she was dying. We didn’t understand that when we went to see her, we were just happy to go visit mom. But she knew it. As I reflect back upon the conversation decades afterwards, what she was saying, she knew she was going to die soon. At the time, it was weird in my memory she was saying these things.

And so that’s how it was in the 60’s for kids facing that kind of a challenge.

Zierler:

Your father didn’t prepare you for what was coming?

Gates:

Yes and no. That’s an interesting question. On that last visit she did not explicitly say, “I am not going to be with you.” That, “I am going to die.” That was not said. But what she did say was that she (and she was adamant in this in a way that I had, at the time, I remember I was puzzled by) she said, “I want you to take care of each other.” And she said it over and over to all four kids. “You’ve got to take care of each other.”

The other thing she said, which I also remember, was she told dad, “Don’t break them up.” I told you earlier my mother was an orphan. She had a brother, but after her parents died and I think her mother died before her father—but after both her parents died, the way they were raised was each were sent to different family members. In other words, they were broken up. And so this admonition she was giving to my father, “Don’t let them get broken up,” came from her childhood experience, I’m now convinced.

And my father, I mean, he didn’t. We were never separated as children. So, you know, like I say, she was a person of imagination, so I think that’s how I got my imagination. When I was in early school, I used to draw a lot and I’m pretty sure, all kinds of figures, characters, cartoon superhero characters, my own comic book—I’m sure all that came from mom. The analytical skill from dad and the emotional artist temperament from mom seem to have been wielded together in my pursuit of creating mathematical/theoretical physics adventures…attempting to comprehend something subtle and profound mathematically that is deeply hidden in Nature.

Zierler:

Jim, I can only imagine the pain and the fear and the emotional turmoil your father was going through just to be bereft of his wife, and to maintain a career, and have these four small kids. Did he share what he was going through with you or was your sense that — not that he necessarily bottled it up, but that when he would break down — and I’m sure he would break down — that he did so privately?

Gates:

So let me talk about a couple of things to respond to that question. The day that mother died, we did not go to the hospital. At that point, we were living with — well, we were living with the woman who had raised my mother. Remember I told you she was sent away to a relative when she was a child? When my father was transferred from Fort Bliss back to San Antonio, we lived with — the lady’s name is Miss Annie Duplan. She’s the lady who raised my mother when she became an orphan, and now, the four of us and my dad, and also her other daughter and her family, were all in her house in San Antonio.

So the day that mom died, you know, dad had been — we had been in the habit of watching dad go to the hospital and come home, but the day that mom died, dad came home and this is, again, a memory I’ll never forget. He sat down and he had his four children to sit on his two legs, two on the side, and he told us that mom was dead. And he was crying, but not bawling, but just tears running down his face. And he hugged us because we — you know, children hearing such a message — at that point, you know what death is. It is the final decision. And he hugged us and rocked us back and forth and said, “We’re going to be OK. We’re going to stick together like your mother said, and we’re going to be OK.” I can recall feeling the stubble from his beard on my face as we all cried together in a pitiful little huddle. Years later, he told me that after Charlie died, he had walked out of the hospital and could not recall where he had parked the family car. It took him a while to find it before he could drive home with this terrible family news.

The only other memory I have from that time is shortly after that. There were three boys and a girl, so all of the boys shared a bedroom and my sister had her own separate bedroom, which was often the case for African American families. I don’t know about other kinds of families, but that was the general pattern if there were boys and girls in the family, boys had a — and there weren’t enough rooms — boys had a room, girls had a room, so my sister had her own.

But it is only recently in the last year or so, a recovered memory suddenly came back to me and I remember lying in bed, and I was probably crying, but in my recollection I can’t remember, but I remember hearing my brother’s cry. And the room was dark. And I remember dad coming to the door and saying, in a very stern voice, “Be quiet. You have to sleep.” And it was a gruff sort of treatment of children in pain. And at the time, I remember being very hurt by it. But now I reflect on what he must have been going through, and to show you the depth of my father’s love, I’ll tell you a story from much, much later in my life.

So mom died 1962. In the middle 90s, I was invited to a conference in San Antonio, Texas, which is where mom died and is buried. I had not been back to mother’s grave in that 30-year plus long period. When I got this invitation to come to this convention, the hosts were kind enough to provide hotel lodging at a guest house, not a commercial building, a guest house, and the room they reserved for me had two beds in it. I called up dad because that’s where he had met my mother in the nineteen forties, that’s where mama had died, and I said, “Dad, if I send you a plane ticket, would you come to San Antonio and spend the week with me? Because I have a hotel room with two beds in it and you can just get out of Orlando and we can just spend some time together.”

And he said yes. He was thrilled that his son was sending him an airplane ticket. We spent the entire — so during the day, I would go and do my conference stuff, but in the evenings, we would just sit and talk. I heard stories about how he had met my mother, for the first time in my life. I never remember hearing any stories before that. He had met my mother in a bar named Tuckers and he said he was on a barstool with some of his friends and they were drinking. San Antonio was a boomtown during World War II because San Antonio has two major air force training facilities, Lackland and Randolph Fields. That’s where thousands of American pilots for the Second World War were trained. It also has Fort Sam Houston, which is a major US Army base.

San Antonio was a boomtown during the 40s. Lots of young people being trained for the military and, you know, there were many jobs there related to the influx of young service personnel. You might try and fail find a job previously but suddenly there are jobs there that draw young people. So Dad was there with some of his buddies, they were out at the bar Tuckers. My father said, “The first time I saw your mother, I was sitting on a barstool with my friends and in walked these several beautiful young women,” and he said, “I saw this one and I almost fell off of my barstool.”

Now my father was very shy in those days, but he said, “I got up my nerve and I went over asked her if she would have a dance with me. And she did.” I heard about how that marriage got started and I heard about the first apartment they had shared, and these are things I had never known in my life before, so I’m almost maybe 50 and I’m hearing this for the first time.

To this day, I do not describe what I do as related to abilities. I just seem to think differently.

For most of my childhood, I did not. In fact, I was not aware there was anything unusual about the way that my mind could work in mathematics or in general in intellectual ways. It just seemed to me that most kids didn’t try and that was my explanation for the difference. It was like, “Well I’m trying hard, that’s why I’m able to do this stuff and they’re not.”

I could no longer keep that illusion by the time I got to tenth grade and there was a very pointed event that caused that. One of my classmates asked me a question one day, and I told him I didn’t know the answer. His jaw fell open and he looked at me and he said, “You didn’t realize that in the entire three years I’ve known you, I’ve never heard you say ‘I don’t know.’” And at that point, I started thinking, “Well, gee, maybe there is something different about the way my mind works compared to my classmates.” But before that, I had never thought so.

I was talking about our chess club earlier, and that was also part of this awakening, that perhaps there’s something different inside. In chess, that I had learned from my friend, Phillip Dunn, it was clear to everyone that only the two of us, being comparable chess players, had minds that worked alike and different from everyone else around us. And so that was also part of my sort of coming to understand the kind of apps and software that run inside my brain.

One difference I learned then within the confines of a segregated community, in contrast to what I see in news media now, was no notion that being African American meant that you could not also be smart. In fact, the sense I obtained at Jones High School was precisely the opposite, “Well if you can do that, then we can too.” It was an affirmation that intellectual ability and achievement was well within the reach of African American who chose such pursuits.

In my high school, I was often described as the smartest kid in my class in school. Even though I wasn’t ragged on incessantly, as one can well imagine when people think you’re the smartest kid in school, that’s probably not going to make you the most popular kid in school. And so around tenth grade, I started doing things because I wanted to change the way that people interacted with me, and one of the things that I did was go to school one day and said, “Call me Jim.” You see, up until that time, everyone had always called me Sylvester and I was perfectly happy with that, but this name change was actually not just a change of name, it was my really beginning to understand how to interact with people in a way that was much more comfortable for me. I could then be around people and have them more at ease. I really started to understand how I was being “socialized” I guess is what I thought. If I developed good “people skills” later on, this was their beginning.

Zierler:

Just the name Jim is more accessible, perhaps, than Sylvester.

Gates:

Exactly. [laugh] Exactly. And I learned how to dance. At one point, I had a reputation of being one of the best dancers in my school. And you don’t really expect the valedictorian (which I became in my senior year) to be, you know, someone who knows how to dance well, but I did that and it was a conscious effort. It was all very conscious and intentional on my part. It wasn’t something I just accidentally fell into. I was consciously changing the human ecology around me and I knew that and worked at it.

I also joined a young men’s club called the Esquires and they were kind of a high school version of a fraternity, except they didn’t have the wild parties and all the stuff you hear about in the movie Animal Farm, little of that stuff went on. But they were known to be the coolest guys and they dressed the cool part as well. And so, I learned how to do that. I became this very interesting hybrid.

There used to be a character on TV named Urkel (Steven Quincy Urkel) on a comedy series, a smart black kid. I was the anti-Urkel because although I got the highest grades in my classes, on weekends, I was at parties dancing and hanging out with the guys in the Esquires Club. And in fact, recently, well, in the last 10 years, I have been visiting Orlando to support mathematics and science at Jones High. I typically go back to Orlando at least once a year because my high school has an award that carries my name for the student that has the highest performance in science or mathematics, and it has been going on for about 15 years or so, except this year, because of COVID, it didn’t occur. But every year I go back to hand that student a check for $1,000 because I tell them, “This is not a scholarship. This is money to recognize what you have already done.”

On one of those visits, one of my classmates was interviewed in the Orlando Sentinel and he said, “Yes, everybody knew Jim was smart, but he was cool smart.” And looking back on what I had done in the 60s, I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.” Yes, I was learning how to interact with people in a way that I still think was rather unusual for physicists, which later contributed to my successful contribution as I went into the domain of public policy and all those sorts of things.

Zierler:

Yes and I was going to ask, I mean just to foreshadow a little bit, in terms of being known as the smart kid, obviously from a math and science perspective, that story kind of wrote itself, but I wonder if you also had a talent or an interest in sort of the policy kind of classes you were taking or the literature classes because obviously those talents require, on your part, an understanding of what makes people tick as well, not just particles.

Gates:

[laugh] Yes. Interest, no. Talent, yes. I got A’s in those classes too. I had some extraordinary literature teachers. The most extraordinary were Ms. Thelma Dudley, and Ms. Lessie Weaver. So, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Grapes of Wrath, literature like was part of my high school experience and I passed tests in those classes too. So, interest, no, but exposure, yes, with the chance to look at what people are through the lens of literature. But there’s another part of my experience in Orlando that was even more educational and informative to me.

My stepmother was very dedicated to seeing her four stepchildren also received a religious education. Every Sunday we children were in Sunday School, and then in church service. We sang in the church choir. So every Wednesday, we had choir practice. Thus, the other part of my coming to understand how people work resulted from my involvement with the Mount Olive AME Church in Orlando, Florida. I went to youth church conferences. The first such conference was in a small town about thirty-four miles north of Orlando named Mount Dora. [The most impactful discovery from my attendance happen at a dinner at lunch near to the AME church where I have my first recollection of hearing Motown music!] Another memorable such convention began with a one hundred and forty-three-mile bus trip to the Edward Waters College campus in Jacksonville, FL. Finally, the longest such excursion involved a bus ride over several days to an AME convention in Pittsburgh, PA. So over some days on a group of young Mt. Olive church members rode to complete that nine hundred and seventy mile trip, attend the meeting over a few days, and then return.

In many AME churches, there’s something called Vacation Bible School, which is kind of a several week-long summer camp, at least in those times in the south certainly. My stepmother had us in those also. I believe there’s a copy of a bible somewhere in my home currently that I won for being the student able to correctly name (along with correct order) the most books in the bible. This was also part of my childhood. And like I said, my greater sense of understanding people are came out of that as opposed to just an understanding of religion.

Zierler:

In terms of your family or mentors in the church or people that you respected, did you ever get influences where you thought about the validity of a religious perspective, believing in God?

Gates:

Of course I did. Are you serious? This is most especially the case as my biological mother died when I was eleven. In fact, that was a corresponding outside component of my life, contemplating beliefs espoused in the church and reflecting on my mother’s death, that made for a whole odyssey. I think a feature of my personality for as long as I can recall, is I always seemed to attempt to process experiences I had lived. When mother died, the question was, “Where did she go?” This happened begin my father remarried. I was already in this process of, what I like to think of as a faith odyssey. During this process, I read a lot about religions, and not just Christianity, but Hindi, Muslim, Zoroastrianism, Greek, Roman, Norse mythology, and something that people call spiritualism. The latter focused a lot on the question of an afterlife and that it is possible to communicate with people after they have died.

I did all that from the time my mother died, which I was 11 and a half, to about I’d say 13 years old, that whole reading period. This was an overlay while being involved in the church and having the formal dogma of Christianity repeated continuously. As a physicist, I’m probably a little bit better informed about religions than most because of that experience, and at the end of the day, probably—other than the time I was I guess 13—I figured out an answer that satisfied me. I do not discuss that answer because I am a private person to some degree and don’t think it is anybody else’s business, but it has kept me grounded in questions of faith and religions for now over 50 some odd years and it is part of the foundation of how I’m able to function in life.

Zierler:

It also suggests a level of emotional maturity perhaps that no one could achieve without having gone through the experience of losing a mother, a beloved mother.

Gates:

Yes. It certainly was a trigger for me.

Zierler:

Jim, when you were thinking about your next steps in high school, I’m curious what put it in your mind—coming from a segregated school outside of Orlando—that a place like MIT—no matter how smart you were, right—what put it in your mind or who put it in your mind that this was something that was in the realm of possibility for you?

Gates:

Let me expand just a bit on that. Also during my teenage years, I discovered Marvel comic books and this is actually very important. This is not an aside. The discovery was made because as I was living with my stepmother and her mother in Orlando. My father at this point was still in the U.S. Army and stationed in Kaisersluatern (“K-town”) Germany. After he remarried by stepmom, the two of them transported us four children from San Antonio, TX (while I was half-way through my sixth grade year in school) to Orlando, FL. Although my dad had wanted to take my stepmom and the four of us along with him to Germany, she did not want to leave her mother alone in Orlando.

So, Dad went alone and finished out his career in the Army on service in Germany before retiring. So it was my stepmother, her mom, and the four kids in this house on Carter St. in the (now called) Parramore neighborhood of the city. There was a barbershop close by and at least once every two weeks or so, the three boys were sent to the barbershop for a haircut. The Parramore neighborhood was the traditional home of the African American community in Orlando. It is divided from the downtown area of the city by an elevated highway “Interstate-Four” that runs along a north-south axis.

As is the case with many similar neighborhoods, the Parramore area is slowly disappearing as the wealthy and municipal needs of the bustling city have displaced residences, churches, businesses and the associated people. One day in the early ‘70s, my dad had seen a city planning document that foretold all of this. This included the fact, that our home on Carter St. was slated to be demolished to make way for a new east-west highway, “the 408.” This was one impetus for the family to move from Orlando to the smaller of Eatonville.

Miss Velma’s was the typical — it is funny because it is the stereotypical image and I don’t know how much you know about black barbershops, but they have a culture all of their own — and this was a black barbershop in every sense of the word. There were three chairs where you could get your haircut and a shave if you were a man. Miss Velma was actually the owner of the shop and there was always present one other guy, we called him Mr. Sammy, who took care of customers in one of the other chairs. Sometimes there would be one other barber for the third — sometimes there, sometimes not. But Sammy and Miss Velma, they were always there.

They cut hair for the kids in the neighborhood. In order to keep waiting kids quiet, they had a collection of comic books. That’s how I discovered Marvel comics. Now, the reason that’s important for how I got to MIT is because if you look at the Marvel comic books—and the movies now—but certainly the comic books then, you’ll find that a number of the main characters are scientists. Reid Richards of the Fantastic Four is a scientist. Bruce Banner (also known as the Hulk) is a scientist. Hank Pym (also known as the Ant-Man) is a scientist. Professor X, the leader of the X-Men, a scientist. Soon after my introduction to the 1960’s “Marvel Comic Universe,” I had a substantial collection that ran the gamut of issues from 1963 to 1969. The other thing that made the MCU a source of special inspiration was the regular appearance of African American characters and superheroes. The crew of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, and all the other artists, inkers, etc. showed people of the African diaspora living also in a world of science, most prominently in the character of the King of Wakanda, T’Challa, the Black Panther.

One of the things that reading those adventures did was to reinforce and reconnect me back to my original discovery of science at four years old as a way of having adventures. I was always good in school and I knew from reading science fiction books and paperbacks, watching science fictions movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still as well as television programs like Rocky Jones, Space Ranger that science had something to do with mathematics that I wanted to have in my life as an adult. This was before I took my first physics class and had not yet heard of physics. So what was inspired by a visit to Ms. Velma’s is a foundation on which my science commitment really increased.

When I was around fourteen, I saw a television program in a series called Make Room for Daddy, and in this particular episode, the family that was the focus of this television show had a nephew come and visit them. This nephew was an extremely smart kid and he went to this very special school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What I got from watching the TV show as a 14-year-old was this was a college where the only — my interpretation at time — where the only thing they made you study was math and science. I used to call that the good stuff when I was a kid.

And so the next time, when father asked, “What college are you going to?” I said, “Well, dad, there’s this place called MIT. That’s where I want to go to school.” And so that’s how MIT came onto my radar. Physics came onto my radar about two years later, so even though Jones High was segregated school—one of the really weird things about segregation is that it meant that people who were extraordinarily talented and qualified were teachers, because they couldn’t get better jobs elsewhere.

Zierler:

Right.

Gates:

And so my high school physics teacher was a gentleman by the name of Mr. Freeman Coney. He actually understood physics. This is something that’s — and in fact, he had a degree in physics — is almost unheard of in the country today independent of the ethnicity of the teacher. Segregation meant that in an all-black school I could have people of extraordinary ability, expertise, and talent even in a field such as physics as my teacher in those days.

Zierler:

Mmhmm.

Gates:

When I was a junior in high school, I was attending a physics class, typically physics was taken by seniors, but I was accelerating through classes. Moreover, as I was about to run out of classes, so as an 11th grader, I got a chance to take a physics class, which normally no one ever got a chance to do. I was the only junior in the class. Mr. Freeman Coney was my physics teacher and two weeks into the course, he demonstrated an experiment where you take a plank, tilt it, and watch a ball roll down the plank while holding a stopwatch. There was also a meter stick along the front of the plank so you could measure the distance compared to the time on the stopwatch. I there saw that the distance traveled versus the square of the time measured on the stopwatch.

I was stunned because though I was always good at mathematics, I had always thought of mathematics in the same way that I thought about reading about the Fantastic Four, the Hulk or the Avengers. I thought of mathematics as an element of my imagination. Even though counting real objects and making shapes obviously has something to do with the real world, I never thought algebra had much to do with the real world. Yet when he performed this experiment, all of the sudden I was stunned into silence. I tell people, “This is the closest thing to magic I have ever experienced in life.” Because mathematics is something we do in here. It is like what Harry Potter learns to do with incantations. At Hogwarts, the kids are saying something that sounds like Latin and then the world changes around them.

[laugh] Right. But that was my father. Another occasion, which is a memory I’ll cherish always, occurred when I gave a talk at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He asked if he could come. I responded, “Dad, it is a technical talk. Only physicists will understand.” He said, “I don’t care. I’ve never seen you give a science talk before.” Soon afterward, I contacted the one of organizers, Prof. Pierre Ramond – one of the most important creators of string theory opening the way to supersymmetry. I explained, “My dad would like to come and hear me talk, do you have an objection?” Typically, only physicists would be in the audience. You know, 10-25 people, no larger it is just physics faculty. Pierre said, “No problem.”

Dad drove up to Gainesville from Orlando and sat in the back of the room to hear me deliver a “raw” science talk. He never disturbed the presentation but the smile on his face was ridiculous is all I can say. It wasn’t just that moment. Something similar happened upon on my admission to MIT. There were many fairly constant occurring events around the joy he took that his firstborn son not just went to college-becoming the first in our family line to do so, but got a PhD in physics, earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in mathematics and one in physics, carried out research at Harvard and Caltech . It was completely clear how he felt about me and how he lived through it. So I was very, very aware of his celebration of the fact that though my grandfather was a sugar cane farmer who could neither read nor write (but apparently could ‘cipher’ i.e. knew some arithmetic), and that he had never properly finished high school, the family was still able to produce a mathematically-enabled scientist who was exploring concepts at the very boundary of theoretical physics.

Zierler:

Now Jim, I know your world was a lot bigger than the south because of the travel that you did with your father because of his career. I wonder, though, if you had a sense first of all, in two ways. In terms of race relations, Boston was — and in some ways still is — highly problematic. And second, coming to the college campus, any college campus, in the late 1960s is — that’s a big step no matter where you’re coming from. So I know your world was bigger than perhaps some of your friends and peers because of your father, but I wonder the extent, looking back, if you understood what it was you were getting into heading up to Cambridge in the late 1960s?

Gates:

In 1969, when I began my undergraduate career at MIT, I expected to be the dumbest kid in class, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t going to MIT for someone else. I was going for me. And to increase my understanding of physics and to broaden my skill set in the mathematics that I do. Because Boston at the time that I was a teenager had the reputation of being the ‘Athens of America’—a phrase that seems no longer used, but it was not uncommon when I was a teenager, that Boston was the Athens of America—so I was actually stunned and surprised because Boston remains—in my entire life’s history—the place where I saw the most overt racial animosity expressed towards me personally up to that point.

When you got to campus—on the academic side, happier question—was it physics all the way right from the beginning or you kept your options open a little bit?

Gates:

I kept my options open a little bit. I came to MIT convinced that I wanted to become a physicist. I dabbled a little bit because — and I still do to some degree — you always should have a plan B. So, my plan B was electrical engineering because it is something that gave more security in trying to get jobs, right, because electrical engineering is a skill that corporate America realizes.

Zierler:

Right.

Gates:

And so that was another plan B. The summer after my freshman year at MIT, I worked as an assistant to an electrical engineer at a company called ‘Dynatronics’ which was General Dynamics Electronics Division. They had a plant in Orlando. And I had a chance to see what young electrical engineers do, and I’m like, “No way, Jose. I can’t do that.”

In fact, that experience was wonderful in an academic way because the work they gave me tasks so simple I could complete them in almost no time. They’d give the assignment, I’d get it done, and one day the gentleman who was my supervisor came into my little cubby and said, “Jim, I got to talk to you.” I responded, “Did I do something wrong? Did I read a circuit diagram incorrectly?” He said, “No, no, no. Your work’s just fine. My supervisor sometimes walks down the hall and a couple of times he’s walked by your door and you’re not doing anything.” And I said, “Well, that’s because I’ve finished everything you gave to me to do.” He says, “Yes, I understand that, but we got to find a solution because he thinks that you’re just goofing off.” Started taking my textbooks on Differential Equations with me and because I had taken it during my first freshman year—I re-taught myself at a deeper level how to understand differential equations. This worked extremely well, due to my freedom I learned the subject much more deeply than in an effort to simply pass examinations with a high grade. I actually learned the subject far more deeply, as I discovered when I returned to MIT in the fall. By accident, I had focused most of my attention on a differential equation, the Coulomb Wave Function, that is used in Quantum Mechanics…and this was before I had taken a course on the subject and the end of my second year at MIT.

How involved were you with the various protests that were going on at campus and how much did you recognize the commonalities of justice that motivated students to protest civil rights issues, women’s rights issues, and anti-war issues?

Gates:

Well, first of all, I was not a protester except for once. There was a terrible and discriminatory case of—at MIT—in my freshman year. There were custodial staff and there was a pay gap. If you were African American or black, your pay was one level. If you were European American or white, your pay was higher...for during the same job. And that was actually policy on campus. And so some of those people who had those jobs came to the Black Students Union—I was a member—and they asked us to support them in a protest. I took part in that protest.

I recognize the commonalities, but one of the things that was striking to me — at least between the difference between what I saw between African Americans as we were protesting about equity and full rights as American citizens in comparison to the anti-war movement especially — is that from my perspective, we always knew how dangerous that was. As a matter of fact, it was not a celebration. That in fact, you could be murdered. The shadows and lesson of the struggle for Civil Rights as well as the reaction of law authorities to black protester were very clear.

That it was not, in my perceptions then, a sense of this danger in the anti-way movement. Many times when I had a chance to watch or talk to people engaged in the anti-war movement, that sense of danger was not there. It was — there was more than anything I detected, a lack of seriousness. I don’t have any marked memories of the folks who were involved in women’s rights. I think it actually happened a little bit after my time. So I don’t have any recollection there.

Well, believe it or not, that was never — I mean, I always suspected it. That was just the confirmation of my lack of dexterity and manual ability to do things. When I began grad school, I did join an experimental research group for a while, but that confirmed absolutely that you shouldn’t let me in anyone’s lab unsupervised. There is physics professor by the name of Margaret MacVicar who in my early years of graduate school was supportive of me in a way that I look back on and I’m very grateful. My valuable lesson learned with finality in her laboratory, was that I would be awful experimental physicist if I ever made the attempt at a career in that direction.

I knew if I was going to be a physicist, it would be at the boundary between physics and mathematics. I had a degree in each one of them.

I was confident that I brought something different to the table that would allow me to create things that, quite frankly, no one else could. And I think in my career I have shown that on a number of occasions. I’ve done things before other people have done them. I’ve done things that are uniquely different and that are correct and innovative. But my sense probably, as a research scientist, probably—certainly by the time I was a senior—that was firmly in my mind. But it wasn’t so much because I had done the research, that’s not quite true.

I told you about my summer experience taking my books with me to work in order to appear to be working. That was actually like what we now call a research experience for undergraduates. I basically had taught myself things that I didn’t know, and in the process, learned how to do that, therefore learned how to do research. That began to formation of my identity as a researcher.

By the time I was a senior through—actually through lots of educational experiences because I’m now in my 48th consecutive year of teaching. I’ve been teaching every year since 1972. And so from working with people in mathematics teaching them, I was completely confident that I could do mathematical physics research and teach.

Zierler:

Jim, how big was your purview in theoretical physics beyond MIT? In other words — this is a question not just about you, but about the curriculum. This, of course, is a golden age of theory in physics, and so I’m curious if you are aware of — right when you were an undergraduate — what people like Len Susskind and John Schwarz were doing in string theory or what David Gross was doing in asymptotic freedom, or some of the work that was being done at the national laboratories, really, you know, finding new particles and doing new physics in a fundamental way almost every year. I’m curious if looking back, if you had a sense for what a truly fundamental and exciting time this was for physics generally?

Gates:

Yes, very pointedly and directly. One of the experimenters involved in the discovery of the charm-quark at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was also one of my physics teachers at MIT. So, I was very much aware of the excitement around discovering new quarks. You mentioned David Gross—I first saw David probably around 1975 or so. Let me come back to that shortly.

I was already a faculty member myself before I met Lenny Susskind or John Schwarz. This was sometime after 1982. So, I was not aware of their fundamental contributions during the period they [were] occurring contemporaneously with my early graduate school years. As both of their works would evolve to include aspects of ‘supersymmetry,’ it was only after 1975 that I became fully aware of their works. Somehow I got wind of string theory when I was an undergraduate. I got my undergraduate B.S. degrees in ’73. In the ’72, ’73 time period, I had somehow learned about the fact that if you — I remember asking a teacher and his reaction — I’m saying, “Isn’t there something funny about a system of 26 scalar fields and gravity?” Well, that turns out to be the critical dimensions of string. I’m not sure how I came across it, but I certainly was aware that there was something very interesting and odd going on in theoretical physics. This was also around the time of the birth of supersymmetry, so I was watching the developments that went on across the river at Northeastern because some of the early supersymmetry pioneers were there too and had done some interesting work.

Also, I think I had — at least on the theoretical side — I had a pretty broad picture of the excitement that was going on in fundamental physics, not so much in gravity because there wasn’t so much in gravity going on. And certainly in graduate school I knew that the only things I really possibly wanted to do was either study gravitation or elementary particles. And the thing that made the difference was observations. The fact elementary particle physics had data, and I said, “That’s what drives physics so that’s what I’m going study.”

Most of the advice was go. Most people I talked to said you should go to another institution for graduate education, it’ll broaden you, get a bigger perspective on the field and what have you. And quite frankly, when I applied to graduate school, I was admitted to three different programs. I was admitted to Stanford in plasma physics because I thought I had an interest in plasma physics. I had taken at least one plasma physics course at MIT and I found it intriguing.

I got admitted to — I can’t remember the middle one — and then I got into MIT for physics. What actually decided me in the end is I tell people, you know, like most other people, I was insane so I use an insane decision-making process. I had this “stuff” I had accumulated in four years at MIT. I had a couple of big suitcase/trunks and I looked at them one day and I said, “You know, if I stay here, I don’t have to worry about shipping this stuff across the country.” Now, that’s partially a joke, but that was part of the decision, so I’m going stay at MIT.

Zierler:

I think as a physicist, you’ll recognize how powerful the force inertia can be.

Gates:

Exactly. And the other thing about staying at MIT was of the places that I had been admitted, the one that had the clearest path for me getting to particle physics or was MIT. So there was that decision also. One person here whose advice weighed heavily in my thinking was Dr. Albert G. Hill. Dr. Hill, MIT Vice President for Research, played a key role at a critical point in my decision. During the Second World War, he headed the component of MIT that had made important contribution to the development of radar.

Zierler:

Besides an intellectual adventurousness on the part of a graduate student to take this on, let alone to be the only person in a place like MIT who knew what you were talking about on this topic, it also suggests a level of strategic thinking in terms of setting yourself up.

Gates:

Yes. In my second year of graduate school, I decided that a physics career is really a business. The things one would do to grow a business are the things one needed to do to have a successful career. And even picking out supersymmetry itself was in fact an example of strategic thinking. When I first began working with Prof. Jim Young as his advisee, he had me working on the kind of physics that involves a weak interaction. W and Z bosons, quarks and leptons, and in fact I actually published, I think, my first two or three papers on those subjects. This is the line of mathematical physics pioneered by Sheldon Glashow, Salam Strathdee, and Steven Weinberg. All three became recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics for their work. The discovery of the Higgs Boson was the ultimate confirmation of this dazzling line of particle physics theory.

However, as I was working in that early period in their field, I noticed that every month we would get these papers called “preprints” which described the latest concepts and idea being explored and presented. Today there is a website called the “arXiv” that serves this function. Now on any day, there can be seen new research posted every day, but in those days, once a month there was this big bundle of mail packages out and the new physics papers would come in it. They were called free prints. I noted the area I was working in was just overloaded with people doing not quite the same thing as me, but very closely related things. And some of these people were senior faculty members who had gotten their PhD maybe almost a decade ago.

I thought, “You know, this is crazy because there’s me and all these young kids like me and we’re trying to do this stuff and you have these experienced professors and they’re doing it too. Who has the better chance of accomplishing something important? It is not us.” So, at that point, I decided to take a survey of everything going on in particle theory. I had these big lists of topics and publications and timelines of when things were developing, and it was this process that allowed me to discover the then new topic of supersymmetry. I was in that process of trying to figure out what’s the best strategic move for my planning in my career? So yes, it was strategic from the very beginning.

Zierler:

We could just do a little intellectual history at the time to see where you pick up. There’s 1970 with Flitsiyan and then there’s 1972 with Schwarz and Green and then along comes QCD and that sort of rains on the parade, right, a little bit on that second model.

Gates:

Yes, there’s a lot of truth to that analysis. Yes.

Zierler:

Where does supersymmetry come in based on the idea that now QCD sort of lays to rest a lot of that early excitement from 1970 and then 1972 with string theory?

Gates:

First of all, string theory was dead basically when I decided to study supersymmetry, but what had happened was supersymmetry actually has two different origins, and this is not generally known outside the field. The string theory origin is the one that people are most familiar with here in the United States, but there’s a totally independent origin of the subject that comes from Ukraine.

And obviously when you’re applying interest in gravity to these other interests, there are some pretty grand intellectual pursuits at the heart of this, right? Were you thinking along these lines, that it would be possible to have a grand unified theory? Were you using that phrase? Were you thinking that this is where this might be headed?

Gates:

Not at first. When I first started my interest in supergravity, it came out of the fact that at its heart — if you look at all of my mathematics, I claim that heart — the thing that runs through what I do is geometry. Einstein used the geometry of curved space time to reach his theory of gravity. I was all into—so if we have this other thing called superspace, is there kind of geometry that leads one to understand how supergravity comes out of it? And that’s what actually ended my thesis, and that’s what I settled with Warren in our first works at Harvard, was the answer is yes, but it does it in a way that is far beyond anything Einstein ever imagined in terms of the technical intricacy that it takes to realize it.

Now, in this period, supergravity is being explored by other people and it is noticed that if you make this supersymmetry larger and larger, what happens is in order to study it, you have to not just talk about gravity, you have to start adding forces that look like electromagnetism. And so very early on, there starts to be hints that there’s some kind of approach to unified theories that involve supersymmetry. And then shortly, as I was a postdoc, that idea was pursued more strongly. That strongly suggested physicists needed to study the concept of extra dimensions, and then string theory roars back in, and I find—this is when as I’m an assistant professor, and there’s a piece of work in 1980 by Daniel Friedan which, to this day, does not get the credit that it should, in my opinion. He wrote a research paper with an astounding result. His paper showed that if Einstein had never lived, there’s a way to derive Einstein’s equations. And I was an assistant professor when I saw that paper, and at that point, I knew that unified field theories were some place just around the corner.

Due to my interest, what I had been doing as a postdoc and later as an assistant professor at MIT, I was then in position to be working on the mathematics that empowered string theory before fully developed string theory came into existence. So, my first contributions to string theory was sort of before numerous people were interested in string theory.

Zierler:

Now obviously, you’re dealing with some very big numbers with this research. I want to ask, are computers part of the equation for you? Are you relying on computers? Are computers at that point? Are they relevant based on their computational power, where the technology is? Or are computers playing catch-up with you and the theories that you’re working with?

Gates:

Let me divide answering the role of computers into two different time zones if I can call them that. The theory of supergravity, invented in 1976 by Dan Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen ultimately required a mathematical proof of its consistency that depended on a computer program. The numbers of calculations that had to be done, approximately four thousand, were beyond human capacity. So Peter Van Nieuwenhuizen led the effort to successfully show this. Though this work was done in 1976, it would only much later be recognized properly by the award of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2019. Computers actually enabled supergravity to come into existence. Without computers, there would be no hard analytical proof that this theory was actually mathematically self-consistent. After that role, the use of computers basically disappeared. It was enabling the foundational role, but then it became irrelevant. Since 2014, working with students in my research group, we have made extensive use of computer to make billions of calculations. From my perspective this has nicely come from an overlap in my interest in physics teaching.

Beginning in 1999 work with Prof. Vincent Rodgers of the University of Iowa, there was established the “Summer Student Theoretical Physics Research Session”. This effort permits an on-ramp to undergraduate students and sometimes even high school students to become interns in my research group. In 2014, I was working with University of Maryland undergraduates Mathew Calkins and Delilah Gates, together with a scientist named William Golding my research began an uptake to incorporate modern computational capacity and robust algorithms. There are problems in supersymmetry string theory that are 40-year unsolved problems, and part of the reason for that is because of the computational difficulty.

Zierler:

Is still there, you’re saying.

Gates:

These problems were still unsolved, which is a major driver of my research these days. In 2014, I began to study the issue about why some of these problems are unsolved, how do you create algorithms to find solutions? I wrote this one paper with these other three folks, and the title was “Think Different: Applying the Old Macintosh Mantra to the Computability of the SUSY Auxiliary Field Problem.”

By 2014, because it is clear to me the computer technology was advancing so rapidly that some of these problems that had defied being solved for decades, now with the aid of computers, we might be able to solve some of them. I started thinking about algorithm architecture design for how to set these things up in 2014. By 2020 we had built out a way of thinking about things, and we have solved some problems in what’s called M-theory, that some believe are the ultimate “theory of everything.” Unfortunately, there remains so little actually known. However, we have increased the ability to calculate systems of this nature with billions of variables.

Let me describe the challenge we recently surmounted. In quantum mechanics, we’re used to the idea that things cannot be in a definite place. They can be in multiple places. When applied to M-theory, there are a number of functions that have to introduced in order to even answer questions that’s consistent with this ability to be in multiple places. And a number of functions for M-theory — and this the lower limit — is 2 billion, 147 million, 483 thousand and 648 degrees of freedom times two.

This is a number that’s so large just to begin, and the simple question is — so let me set it up as a story; let’s imagine there were aliens out there travelling rapidly in a starship and they were watching a physicist make some calculations of in M-Theory. Imagine the physicist made an error. And to make this story even more fanciful, let’s assume the physicist doing the calculation was Ed Witten and he made a mistake – a joke of course. The aliens wish to be helpful, so they want to send a message to correct his mistake. And so they send back information, but if they’re in some kind of starship, that information has got to account for the fact that they’re moving near the speed of light or something.

To get at that question — because we now have solved it — we had to go beyond Einstein — or certainly beyond Einstein and even beyond the standard model. If you look at the mathematical structure of the standard model, mathematicians will tell you these are what are called “fiber bundles” and there are functions associated with fiber bundles called connections. The thing that got us to allow supersymmetry was to realize that connections themselves, at least in the context of supersymmetry, have substructures of more fundamental mathematical objects called prepotentials. And Warren Siegel and I, as we were postdocs, were among most deeply studying the role of prepotentials in describing physics or equations that are similar to physics that have supersymmetry.

It was the discovery of prepotentials, but I think it was the big output from that early period in my career when I was trying to figure out gravity and how does it fit together with the connection technology. And it was my collaboration with Warren — it would have never happened if I had not been asking the question, and bumped into Warren — who was also asking the question, but from a very, very different point.

Zierler:

Jim, either based on the papers that you were writing at the time or talking about your dissertation at conferences or basically whatever means you were using to get this research out into the broader physics community, who were some of the most important people who were paying attention to what you were doing? Who, in turn, might have opened up new opportunities and avenues of research for you?

Gates:

That question is so simple to answer; John Schwarz, Abdus Salam, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen.

Zierler:

That’s it.

Gates:

But there’s a slightly earlier—before my thesis advisor, who—professor at MIT named Ken Johnson and when I was a second- or third-year graduate student, he was one of the professors I was trying to see if he would be willing to take me on as an advisee. I walked into his office, I had a transcript of grades and what have you. So I walked in his office and told him what I wanted to do. And then he began to tell me, “Well, you know, this is extraordinarily difficult and rapidly evolving field. Maybe you should think about another area of physics.”

At that point I let the conversation die, but I was highly insulted because from my perspective, he didn’t know anything about me. How was he able to make such snap a judgment? I was insulted. I responded with “Fine,” while silently thinking “Fine, I will talk to someone else.” I continued looking until I ultimately found Jim Young. So fast forward two and a half years, I’m finishing up my thesis — which was by the way very interesting — my defense committee was composed of Professors. Jim Young (my advisor), Roman Jackiw (the person I earlier told you I wanted to be my advisor), and the third person on the defense committee was Ernie Moniz (our former Secretary of Energy), Ernie Moniz.

The thesis defense was wonderful. Figuratively, “They never laid a glove on me.” It is not hard to figure out why because I knew more about what I was talking about than anyone else in the room. They could ask me questions about other things that I wouldn’t perhaps know, but not about what I was doing as a research topic.

Zierler:

Right.

Gates:

And as a consequence, Ernie said something to me, which I have always treasured; he said, “Jim, that was the best thesis defense I have ever seen.” About 15 years ago, while he was the Secretary of Energy I said, “Ernie, you remember what you said about my thesis defense?” I said it in a way as I wanted to make sure I didn’t have a false memory. This my question I said, “Do you remember what you said about my thesis defense?” I didn’t say anything else. He repeated almost exactly the same words. I had remembered clearly! In fact, there is a video on YouTube created at a Department of Energy event where he kids me about this episode. For many years, I was a fan of science fiction. In the lore of the Star Trek series there is an expression “Kobashi Maru” that describes how Captain James Kirk was able to defeat a no-win simulation of a battle between starships. He re-programmed the software prior to taking the examination. In a figurative sense, I had done the same regarding my Ph.D. thesis defense.

When I finished my PhD, becoming a postdoc at Harvard, I became a Junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. To become a junior fellow, you have to be nominated by a previous Junior fellow. Ken Johnson, that same professor who I felt insulted me so badly, was the person who nominated me to become a junior fellow at Harvard in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

In 2019 I found out I was the second African American man who had ever become a Harvard Junior fellow and the first such scientist they ever had. It had been that same guy, he had been listening and I think he probably interacted with Ernie who said something like, “This kid is fine.” I took away from this experience to try never again to be hasty in judging the motivations of others.

That’s how I got to Harvard. It was those folks. It was the MIT crowd, Ernie, Jim - my advisor, and Ken Johnson. Getting from Harvard to Caltech, which was my second postdoc, was all on John Schwarz. I met John a couple different times while in this period of my life. He clearly had examined some of the work I was doing on supergravity along with my co-author Warren Siegel as we were trying to understand geometry and what have you and was aware of the mathematical intricacy and depth of what we accomplished. Figuratively, and perhaps and little literally, we were following in the footsteps of Albert Einstein. In the period of 1907-1916, Einstein had wrestled with how to use the concept of the geometry of “the four-dimensional space-time continuum” to write a theory of gravitation. The concept of the space-time continuum was not an original idea from Einstein. It originated with one of his former mathematics professors, Hermann Minkowski in 1908. At first Einstein was dismissive of the idea. Later he reversed himself and concluded that the space-time concept was the key to success. By 1916 he showed this was indeed the case.

In the case of supergravity, the analog of the “the four-dimensional space-time continuum” was a 1974 construction proposed by Abdus Salam and John Strathdee who introduced the concept of “superspace.” Thus, their role in 1974 was exactly analogous to that of Minkowski. As did Einstein, Warren and I were attempting to use ideas of the geometry of superspace to reach a theory of supergravity. At first Warren, like Einstein was not particularly interested in the possibility of a curved supergeometry as was obvious in his first brilliant works. On the other hand, I had begun researching a curved supergeometry even in my Ph.D. thesis. In 1979 our first joint publication our disparate viewpoints had been aligned and we succeeded as had Einstein. The title of our paper was “Superspace Supergravity” and we had become the first physicists in the world to give a complete and comprehensive description using curved supergeometry and we had done so connecting to Warren’s insight on a non-geometric quantity called the “supergravity prepotential.”

One of the places would have been CERN where the Higgs-Boson was discovered in 2012 because that’s where Bruno Zumino had an appointment. He was actually one of the “fathers of supersymmetry” along with Julius Wess. Remember I told you about this geometry, he’s one of the people who used those geometrical ideas, but without initially including gravitation, that I began to learn when I was a graduate student. If I was at CERN, you could have had a committee where people knew more than I did about the subject.

OK. Let’s talk about entry to Harvard. As I mentioned, Ken Johnson, a former junior fellow nominated me, and to my very great surprise, the application was taken seriously. And the next stage in the selection process involved a face-to-face interview. Since Harvard was just down the street from MIT, pretty simple for me. In fact, it was even closer than MIT. I was living in Cambridge about halfway between Harvard and MIT. I literally could walk to either institution.

I took the Mass Avenue bus up to Harvard and I had a designated address where the Society of Fellows was carrying out its interviews. So when the interview came, I actually walked over to the location from the bus stop at Harvard Square and I entered a room. There was a long U-shaped table, I silently called it a star chamber proceeding because there’s this long table and seated around the table are the illustrious academicians of the society, and then there’s this one chair set at the open part of the U and I think there was a small desk or table in front of it, and that’s where—as an interviewee—you sat.

There was a round of questions. And the society is not centered on physics. It is a multi-disciplinary collection of very illustrious academicians, but it obviously includes some physicists on the examination committee. There was one physicist named Howard Georgi and when I walked in, it was clear that it was his task to ascertain whether I was a complete dummy in physics or not. There was nothing that actually happened untoward then. It is just my sense of humor here. Nothing pejorative happened. Some say I have a very dry sense of humor. So much so that on some occasion I have been accuse of being totally humorless.

He started asking me a whole bunch of physics questions. They were trying to assess how much of what this young person claims to have mastered has actually been mastered.

We went through that song and dance, and it seemed to go pretty well. In that stage of the interview, it sort of shifted and somebody asked me, “Well, do you have any other intellectual pursuits besides physics that fascinate you?” And my response was, “Why, yes. I actually read history.” In the room it was like an electric charge went through the room. And you could sort of see people say, “What? A theoretical physicist talking about history? What?” I mean you didn’t actually hear it murmured, but that was the general sense that I got of the reaction around the table.

Harvard was a wonderful time for me, but because of providence. When I first went to Harvard, I didn’t think there would be anybody there who had any insight into my research. I thought it would be like MIT where nobody knew what I was doing. I figured I would wind up continuing to educate myself, but I wouldn’t have to worry—I mean I had a three-year period where I knew I was secure, and therefore I could learn as much as I possibly could to up my skill set.

What happened, however, was I met my friend Warren Siegel, who received his PhD from University of California Berkeley. We were both interested in supersymmetry! At first it seemed there was little interest in the subject among the faculty. And gravity. And it was very funny because at the beginning of the semester, there was a gathering of all the faculty and graduate students and postdocs together and there was a secretary by the name of Miss Blanche Maabe. Her last name was Maabe, “M-A-A-B-E,” Maabe. And Blanche was so kind.

I received this invitation to come to this thing and it was before the semester and I went to her office and she introduced herself, and says, “Here, come with me. I’m going to take you to where the activity’s going.” And she took me to the activity. And the room was full of people and there was a buzz and what have you. Of course, I’m the only African American there, right? But before we got into the room, she said, “I’m going to introduce you to someone who does exactly what you do.” And I thought to myself as she said it, “That can’t possibly be true.” But it was.

My question to start things off today is in what ways did your need to survive that experience make you a better person and a better physicist?

Gates:

For most physics postdocs at any time, any place, any ethnicity, any gender, and any personal identification, however you dice it or slice it, being in a postdoc phase is always going to be a time of trying. I’m a science fiction fan and was a comic book fan, I used to read comic books, mostly Marvel, in the 60s, as I think I told you in our last presentation. The Marvel character of Thor has a hammer named ‘Mjöllnir’ and that was forged by special conditions. A process something similar to that forging process is essentially what goes on in terms of a personality in one’s scientific preparation as a postdoc.

You think you’ve done a lot in graduate school, but attending finishing school is basically what the period of being a postdoc is accomplishing. What ways did I change in that period, especially at Harvard? Well for me, the most valuable part of my experience at Harvard was not as a physicist, but it was a coming to understand something about the culture of academia because not only was I at Harvard, I was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

As I learned in 2019 it was revealed I was the first African American scientist junior fellow in Harvard University’s history. But that meant I had interactions with other junior fellows and senior fellows. One of the other junior fellows was Edward Witten and this is how I came to formally meet him, though I had once seen him when I was a graduate student at MIT. One of the traditions of the Harvard Society of Fellows is on every Monday junior fellows have dinner with senior fellows. So by this means, I met some outstanding people across a panoply of disciplines and studies, but also I got a chance to sort of look at their culture because again, as I’ve mentioned, in some sense I’ve always been a watcher of what I call “the human ecology” around me. I guess it is working at being a little bit of an amateur anthropologist/sociologist.

I was watching that — and this stems from my childhood being on military bases and what have you — that culture. I was struck by a couple of things. I remember one of the most striking conversations I had was with another junior fellow and he said something striking — we were talking about the history as that’s also an amateur concern of mine — about the United States history and the progress of European American settlers across the country, the so-called “winning the west.” One of his first statements was, “Well, the European settlers had a right to the land because they could increase its carrying capacity for human habitation.” At the time, I thought, “Well, this is really quite remarkable a statement.”

I started playing pool when I was an undergraduate, so I had had my own pool cue. Not too long before hearing that statement and coming to Harvard, my pool cue was stolen. My apartment had been broken into and the only thing taken was my pool cue. So as the statement was made back to me, I was thinking, “You know the guy who stole my pool cue could probably say the same because he’s probably a better pool player than I am. That doesn’t make it morally right.” That kind of reasoning among people who the rest of the world says are incredibly intelligent was certainly an eye-opening experience for me.

Other things, when I said survive — well, survive in the sense of trying to figure out how good a physicist I would become. At the beginning of my time at Harvard I met my friend Warren Siegel, who became my close collaborator, enhanced my research to work, on this theory called supergravity. One of the most profound influences he had on me was to understand that great theoretical physics requires intuition first, and calculation second. I also had met Edward Witten. It was curious to me because the brightest physicists I met—and Michael Peskin (currently physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator) was my officemate. I noted that the smartest of the physicists I met at Harvard had no issue with my ethnicity. I found that a very interesting observation. In some sense, the people at the top of the ecosystem really came extraordinarily close to this ideal of being color-blind in my experience. They really didn’t care if you were green or purple or orange. All they cared about was the quality of ideas that came from you, and that was an extraordinarily encouraging thing for me.

Zierler:

And liberating too probably, right?

Gates:

Liberating, yes, because I knew I would be able to talk to these people about my ideas, even if some were half baked sometimes, and that I could trust the feedback I was getting. You’ll notice I talked about the top level in physics, where I probed, that’s not necessarily true further down. It was also not true outside of physics as I explored. I found in the some of the junior fellows, people who one might expect are at the very top of the ecosystem, the same kinds of prejudices that one can encounter - maybe in milder forms – elsewhere in our society. But they were there. That was driven home to me by the comment on Native Americans and on my first visit to England also a few years later.

The difference was tremendous, absolutely tremendous. As I was leaving MIT, I was considering — the “gauge supersymmetry” equations developed by two physicists at Northeastern, Richard Arnowitt and Pran Nath — what they were trying to do to combine the idea of supersymmetry with Einstein’s General Relativity. However, there was clearly something wrong with what they were doing. Yet my natural intuition was that Einstein’s foundation of some kind of geometry was the right way to go, but why wasn’t it working with their approach to supergravity, which they had created in that time. The problem with their approach was that it ignored a quantity called “torsion” which is essential for a geometrical superspace theory to generalize Einstein’s General Relativity Theory. I was trying to figure this out and fix the problem of their approach.

What was the primary problem was the goal I had set for myself when I went to Harvard. I met Warren Siegel – he had very different ideas – but our two sets of ideas combined together were extraordinarily powerful because we could then immediately connect to Einstein’s ideas, but we could also connect to these new ideas of supersymmetry and especially to curved superspace in such a way that it was consistent with quantum mechanics. So the research advanced enormously.

I also got a chance to work with someone for the second time in my life. The entire time I was an undergraduate and a graduate student at MIT, with one exception, I never worked in groups. I never went to a study group. I never did my homework with other students. It was always, for me, an individual activity, except for the time that I was studying for my PhD qualifying exam with Ronald McNair, the future astronaut to be who died in the Challenger Explosion in 1986.

In fact, during graduate school, Ron and I were friends. We used to hang out with each other, go to each other’s places, go to parties, all sorts of things. I met his brother Carl. Moreover, Ron and I studied together for a PhD qualifying exam at MIT after both of us had failed the first time. This failure was at the time the greatest setback in my dream of becoming a theoretical physicist. This gave me a tremendous reason, and actually motivated me to study with someone else. I said, “You know that old saying about when something doesn’t work, you shouldn’t try to do it exactly the same way again?” I was implementing that by saying, “Well gee, let me study with somebody.” Ron was also a tremendously focused person so we studied together which cleared the roadblocks from both of our dreams.

When I went to Harvard, back to your question, I started working with my friend Warren Siegel. It taught me a lot of very interesting things I had not really understood and about even the way I think about things. I had encountered another intellect that could act as a sounding board in the way that I developed ideas and the way I approached the work. I’ll never forget, one day Warren said something, which I thought was quite remarkable. “You should never start a calculation before you know the answer,” was his comment. I thought it remarkable because I always had thought that’s why you calculate, so you can find the answer. His comment opened my eyes to an alternative viewpoint. One should do calculations to either prove or disprove one’s intuitive understanding of the mathematics required for the physics.

Well you’ve heard my childhood history. I grew up moving around. The call of the road is something that I still hear to this day. That would certainly be one way to exorcise it.

Zierler:

But my question was after your fellowship at Harvard you pursued another postdoc, and my question is did you think about full-time assistant professor opportunities or you knew that another postdoc would be useful to you long-term?

Gates:

Again, you’re very insightful, David because although I didn’t think about it — and thank you for asking the question because that modifies something I said earlier — although I wasn’t thinking about it, some physicists at the City College of New York did attempt to recruit me to an assistant professorship. And I was flattered. I mean, I went and I spent sort of a week with them looking at the department, but also looking at New York City. I concluded that in order to live well there the way I like to live, I would have to have an extraordinary amount of money! The prospect of living in The City and living well were two incompatible things.

Like I said, it was very insightful for you to ask that question. That was another possible off ramp that — a serious off ramp that I had — as I went from Harvard to Caltech with one other slight possibility. My friend, Ronald McNair — with whom I had studied with as a graduate student — in that same time period challenged me to apply to NASA because they were looking for a new class of astronauts.

Ron and I had both, as teenagers in high schools—in different states and not knowing one another—had been fascinated by space travel. During our period of close interactions in the MIT Physics Department as graduate students with friends, we talked about our interests in high school. We were both Star Trek fans, for example. He told me his stories about going to the library in North Carolina and asking the librarian about where can he find the books about stars, she directed him — well first of all, they didn’t want him in there because he was African American and this is in the South in the nineteen sixties.

There is a story of an African American physicist tells that when he was much younger asks about where he could find books on stars and the librarian directed him to stories about Hollywood. Those are not the stars for which this particular person was looking. Ron had experiences like that. Ron knew the birth of my love for science was exactly contemporaneous with a love of space travel in a four-year-old child (me) living on an army base Fort Pepperell near St. John, Newfoundland a maritime Canadian territory. As President Obama was to say in 2013 as I received the Medal of Science, “You can be a child living on an army base dreaming about the stars,” and that was me.

Ron knew that also, and so he challenged me to apply as I about to leave Harvard. I did so thinking that nothing would come of it. To my very big surprise, I made it to the—there was several rounds of cutting the applicant pool down—tone just before the final selection of a new class of astronauts. I was invited to the Johnson Space Flight Center and if they had said, “Yes, Jim, we would like to invite you to become an astronaut,” I’m not sure what would have happened. But they said no, and therefore Caltech was my next destination.

Zierler:

Wow. So you were that close to becoming an astronaut.

Gates:

Yes, I tell people that’s a whole another story in my biography that sometimes elicits queries. I tell people NASA told me, figuratively, I had the wrong stuff. Only people with the right stuff get to become astronauts. But yes, and it was actually quite an experience as a visitor to the Johnson Space Flight Center for a psychological and physical evaluation. While there, in a small office Ron took me to meet three future-famous astronauts. I met Charlie Bolden, who did become an astronaut. He was already in training when I met him. He also ended up his career being the NASA Administrator during the Presidential Administration of Barack Obama. I met Fred Gregory, the first African American pilot of a space shuttle. Also, I met Guion Bluford, the first African American to fly in space!

I met all three of these guys at the same time as I was being evaluated to see if I would be permitted to go from astronaut candidate to journeyman astronaut. That was a really fun day. I look back on that day often and think, “Wow.”

At MIT, those pranks are called hacks. The greatest hack I’ve ever seen was some group of students made it appear as though there was a car on top of the dome. And I don’t know if it was an actual car or just some kind of model that they had put together, but MIT always had this sense of fun in science, so I got that sense long before I got to Caltech…where the same sort of tradition prevails.

Zierler:

Were there particular people you were excited to work with to go to Caltech like John Schwarz, for example?

Gates:

Well, the odd thing about going to from Harvard to Caltech — and even being at Harvard — is there were no senior people who knew essentially anything about what I did. The junior fellows — I think mentioned this side of the fellowship — were just hired on judged quality. They didn’t hire according to how well you align with what’s going on in the department or on campus. But you have to physically be there. They perceive quality and they make their bets, right? I wasn’t an apprentice. There is a story, perhaps an “urban myth,” that when a very distinguished senior physics faculty member at Harvard was asked about his interest in the subject of supersymmetry his response was being “super uninterested” in supersymmetry. When I got to Caltech — although John Schwarz was, without a doubt, the main reason I and my collaborator and friend Warren Siegel were simultaneously hired to continue the work at Caltech that began at Harvard — but neither of us was not John’s postdoc, nor were we anyone’s postdoctoral apprentices. The person most responsible for this remarkable flexibility was Professor Murray Gell-Mann, a1969 Nobel recipient for his work in particle physics. Murray was also the “motive force” who supported John’s appointments with the Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy division at Caltech.

Well first of all, in order to do superstring theory, you actually have to use supergravity. That’s the first thing. You don’t get to superstring theory unless you use supergravity. The two are intimately tied up, but they’re not the same thing. I didn’t actually work on it — but the birth of superstring theory was after I left Caltech. John was in the process of the struggle with Michael Green to actually create this while Warren and I were there — the way to think about it is perhaps in musical compositions.

Everyone is used to the idea that composers go through great angst and periods of uncertainty and struggle as they’re composing great pieces of music or that artists have these same periods where there’s this internal emotional battle going on while they’re creating a great piece of painting. It works like that in mathematical physics, also. There are these periods that you go through where you don’t know what is going to come out. You are operating on your intuition. Is it going work? Maybe it is all going to crash and burn. Maybe it is mathematically inconsistent, but you will not know that until the end of the process. The only thing that is driving you is your intuition about the equations.

So all that was going on with John and Mike Green, a physicist in Cambridge at the time that I was a postdoc there. Warren and I were quite divorced from that work. We were busy creating a deeper understanding of supergravity theories. In my case, also during that period, when I was at Caltech — there are these mathematical objects called forms, which are extraordinarily important in understanding geometry — this a piece of work that I finally understood how to extend these mathematical ideas into the realm where they were consistent in supersymmetry. They were to prove to play a critical role in performing the mathematical calculus operation in the confines of curved superspace with maximum transparency and efficiency.

So like I said, we were busy pushing the boundaries in the supergravity direction, although we were aware that John was struggling with superstring theory there on the other side.

Zierler:

What were some of the major questions that were being raised as a result of this research?

So let me try to respond in several different ways to that question as you opened up by talking about Shelly. I think was it 15, 20 years ago, there was this television program called The Elegant Universe, and both Shelly and I are people who comment as participants. Brian Green was the major host of the program, based on his book by the same title. These criticisms Shelly made at the time, I think I take not take very seriously. I do now because although Shelly did not formulate his criticism in a way that—to my mind—what was precise enough, I now can make a precise formulation of his criticism and I agree with it.

The criticism has to do — it is a very deep question that, as I said, if you listen to and take it seriously, you’ll eventually work your way to the deep question that he’s raising. It in fact goes to the foundation of physics, all the way back to the question of “demarcation” as formulated by the extraordinary philosopher of science Karl Popper, and Shelly’s question actually points—if you think about it long enough—points back to the work of Karl Popper. That’s what I had worked through in my mind in the years since that time.

And it is a very precise criticism if you think about it long enough. So if you look at string theory as it is practiced by most people in the field today, it is extraordinarily mathematical, precisely as Shelly was criticizing, but what the string theorists will tell you is well these string theories exist in all these other dimensions and we have this process called compactification that allows us to get down to four dimensions. And so there are lots of kinds of compactification. The one that became first widely known was something called Calabi-Yau compactifications after the mathematicians, Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau.

So the business of making use of these mathematical tools to bring string theory down to four dimensions began. However, after that about once every four or five years, someone figured out a new way to compactify. Now the problem with that — if you actually watch the equations you’d figure it out — suppose this goes on forever, that every four or five years, someone finds a new way to compact upon these theories. Well, you have no guarantee this process and if you cannot scientifically describe every single possible compactification technique, then you can never be sure string theory was right or wrong because someone could say, “Well, it is just one of the compactifications I don’t know.”

So this is the problem with demarcation and the language of Karl Popper. And so Shelly has got it exactly right in the sense that if your starting point is string theory in higher dimensions—and that is the vast majority of people, where they start—and they appeal to these compactification techniques to say that’s how we predict physics, then that precisely says that’s not science according to Popper. Progress to ameliorate this sort of “incompleteness” would be most welcome from my perspective. By the way, this sort of incompleteness has no relation to Gödel's “incompleteness theorems.”

So Shelly’s criticism is exactly right for that. However, there’s a hole in that argument. The hole is, suppose you could formulate strings directly in four dimensions. If you can apply a general formulation to strings in four dimensions, you don’t need compactification. That means you don’t need to have to figure out every possible way to compactify. In other words, you reduce string theory to being like ordinary theories, like the standard model. In the standard model, you don’t start off knowing the gage group. You use nature to tell you that it is SU3 because SU2 SU1.

If it is possible to describe four-dimensional string theories directly in four dimensions like that, then this whole criticism that starts with Shelly’s question and winds up with Popper’s answer, that whole criticism goes away. And in 1986 and ’87 and ’88, Warren Siegel and I —at that point back together again now at the University of Maryland this time—showed you can formulate four-dimensional string theories using the same language as used in the Standard Model. It means that this philosophic “trap door” might be avoidable.

It means that at least at the philosophical route, there’s another way to actually attack the problem. In recent time there has emerged the concept of the landscape. It seems to resemble the kind of formation Warren Siegel and I formulated in this late 1980s period.

We were not the only ones, by the way. There were three different groups of physicists in the late 1980s who indicated that one could have four-dimensional string theories with no reference at all to higher dimensions. So it is a very complicated situation. You can’t say that Shelly was completely right, as he certainly raised an important challenge to which no one has given a completely satisfactory response to my satisfaction.

Zierler:

I mean, when you looked at his so-called campaign to make the Harvard Department of Physics quote unquote “string-free” right, I guess one way to read that is it doesn’t have to be sort of attack about is this science or is this not science? Maybe an elegant solution to that is exactly what you did at MIT, which is maybe a department of mathematics is the most appropriate place to pursue these kinds of questions. What would be your response to, “Well, no, actually I am a physicist and I did go on to do academic work in departments of physics.” How do you see all of that playing out?

Gates:

Well, in 2018, I was on a panel, a two-person panel along with a moderator who said, “So as a mathematician...” and my response was, “I have lots of friends who are mathematicians. They would be insulted if they heard you say that.” They make sure I understand that I am a physicist every single day. This was said in jest. I’ve never thought of myself as a mathematician because I know enough about mathematicians to recognize that that is not me.

As a sophomore at MIT, I took a course in what’s called analysis, which is — to me, that’s the real gateway to true mathematics. Most people don’t even know what analysis is. Most physicists don’t do analysis, but if you take a course in analysis at that young age, you come to understand what principle paradigm by which mathematics works, and I know that that is not what I do. So I’ve never thought of myself as a mathematician.

On the other hand, I do tell people I am a “fallen mathematician.” The words “patois,” “pidgin,” or “slang” drawn from linguistics best describes what I do mathematically. But that’s what almost all physicists do. We actually — because we’re concerned with nature and not with the principle paradigms of mathematics — we get to often create mathematics because it is in the quest of trying to understand a problem in nature.

And that’s what I’ve done in my work throughout my career is that I’ve actually created a piece of mathematics, but not because of the sake of mathematics, but because I was pursuing questions in the field of physics. So by the way, MIT ultimately did hire a string theorist in its physics department a couple years after I left, I mean a decade or so after I left, and in fact, most physics departments from the late 80s to the 90s made enormous investments in the number of string theorists hired in physics departments. So history kind of suggests that they were wrong not to consider it a possibility earlier. The string theorist MIT hired was Barton Zwiebach, whose PhD thesis I had supervised while at Caltech.

Zierler:

So I was like, “OK. I understand who you are and my position in this department.” I started thinking about, “Fine. I know who you are, and I know who I am. My job is as a physicist and a creative mathematical physicist independent of what you think about me.” That sort of warrior mentality I talked about — it asserted itself. So two weeks into the job, I’m thinking, “I’m getting out of this place. I just got to figure out how to do it.”

The other thing that —

Zierler:

This is more about the people and not the department. You’re not saying necessarily, “I have to get out of a math department and into a physics department.” This is a comment on the people. So theoretically, the right people could have led you to another mathematics department under the right circumstances.

Gates:

It was about the culture. I wouldn’t say it was about the people. It was about the culture of the mathematics department as I encountered at my alma mater. In fact, at some point as I confronted this, I actually went to the dean of the college and asked about the possibility of actually moving to the physics department, and in no uncertain terms, I was given to understand that was not a possibility. And so it reinforced me — for me — the commitment to get out of this place — to use a recent expression — where the election was rigged. So, I was not going to go into a rigged election, a rigged evaluation process.

The other thing that was fortunate for me in those days—this is the early 80s—is I used to spend my summers in Italy at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. ICTP, as it is called, is still in existence today and it was created by a Nobel laureate. In fact, it was one of the Nobel laureates that shared the prize with Steve Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow. I had met the ICTP Director. Dr. Abdus Salam , in 1978 as recall. For the first time I had been invited to come to a conference at the ICTP and make a presentation.

This part is kind of funny to me. So when I first met Abdus Salam and after my talk, he invited me up to his office at some point, maybe a day or two later. He opened up the conversation by s — or somewhere near the beginning of the conversation — saying, “I didn’t know that you were a Black physicist.” And in my mind — because of who I am — I thought, “What did you want me to do, use Ebonic mathematics to convey that message? Should I be writing those equations in Ebonics?” I didn’t say it, of course, but that’s what went through my head — like a “smart aleck kid.”

The point was that Abdus began to mentor me when I didn’t know I needed mentoring. He made sure that I could come to the ICTP — and I had spent about four or five consecutive summers in Trieste. Trieste’s very close to Venice and but the thing that he understood about me, which I did not understand about myself, was that I by hook, crook, luck, or providence, that I had gotten myself through a system that almost never lets a person like me achieve that, but that I was not conscious of what it was that I could potentially do in the future to add my voice to the field.

He said to me something very curious — I don’t know if that was the occasion or a later occasion, but he said to me — he had always been interested in seeing more — and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact sentence — but the concept was he had always been interested in seeing more Black people in physics because he was convinced that something like jazz would appear.

Now when he made the statement to me, I was totally — I didn’t even know what he was trying to say. You don’t look at Nobel Laureate physicist and say you’re full of beans, right? I’m trying to figure out what is this guy saying to me? Eventually I figured it out about 10 years later and he was making an argument about diversity. It is an argument that I tell people, “Look. Let’s look at music.” In some ways, music is like theoretical physics. There’s symbolic representation, where you write scores and what have you, but then you have the actual performance of the music and the conceiving of the music, the composition of the music.

Imagine a world where only European derivative forms of music was practiced. It could be quite elegant, beautiful, and accomplished. But are we poorer in our world because we also have allowed principally African forms of music to also propagate, be practiced, and developed? I don’t think we’re musically poor. For many years that’s the thing to which I think Abdus was alluding. If you look at human creativity, it is often embedded in a very bizarre and weird way in folklore and the culture from which an individual arises.

This is even true in classical European music. If you’re someone who likes classical music, you know the difference between Satie, de Bussy on one hand or Grieg and Sibelius on the other. Tchaikovsky and Mozart are different yet still. I mean you can tell the difference in the music. It is all music, but it is different. This difference, typically in classical music, can be traced to the folk music that the people who compose the classical music listened to when they were young.

So there is a cultural imprint on something even within classical European music, you can see this cultural imprint in the diversity and richness of the field. And that’s the thing Abdus was telling me, which I did not understand for a decade, about what could happen in physics.

Zierler:

The idea there is that diversity isn’t just lip service, that different worldviews and different perspectives is actually good for the science.

Gates:

That’s what he was saying, but he said it in a way that puzzled me for a decade.

Zierler:

Jim, I want to come back to something that jumped out at me the last time we spoke, and that is it was only until you got to the University of Maryland that you felt fully validated as a scientist, as an African American. Did you appreciate what made Maryland special before you got there, or that was sort of an intellectual reckoning long-time coming?

Gates:

It was not a long time coming. Let me talk about the transition, which only again over a decade later I said, “Wow, they were ahead of me.” So, when I was being recruited as an associate professor — well, first of all, they gave me tenure right off the bat. So, two years at MIT, I immediately transitioned to Maryland with a tenured associate professorship that had been totally out of my reach in life at that point. I just knew that I could do physics as long as I was able and interested in the rest of my life.

And what were your impressions—I mean, you had been on a grand tour of the most elite physics programs in the country, right? Where did you see Maryland Department of Physics ranking among them at the time that you entered?

Gates:

Well, it was not like being at MIT and similar private university physics departments. However, in the quality of the science that my concern, I felt a comparable quality was present. Ranking systems ebb and flow. There is one that is very prominent now that originates in China and if you look at their number one, it is Stanford or MIT in physics, not the whole university. However, interestingly enough, Maryland is in the top 20 in the world in physics. So, when I went to Maryland, as I said, it astounded me there was this high-quality physics department I had never before heard about ae I had been plopped into an Ivy League bubble and not known that physics happens at a comparable level at other institutions.

Berkeley I knew about because it is not formally in the Ivy league, but certainly had a long tradition of great physics there. Similarly, the University of Chicago is not formally in the Ivy League, or is it? Who knows? I don’t know. But for the Research institutions like Berkeley and Maryland, they are highly ranked and for my own personal assessment, even as a young assistant professor, I thought, “These places are ridiculously good.”

When I got to Maryland, it was exactly the opposite. I found senior colleagues that when I voiced this desire, said, “OK. Come into the office. Let me show you how to do this.” So yes.

Zierler:

Did you take on graduate students right away?

Gates:

Yes.

Zierler:

And what was that experience like for you, finally having your own graduate students that it would be your responsibility to mentor and usher them onto the next stage of their career?

Gates:

Well, not what you would think. To begin, the first time I mentored — well, this is my 48th consecutive year of teaching. I’ve taught continuously since 1972, including some summers. Of course there are also term time instructional assignment these days, but in every year I have taught. Due to all these circumstances, by the time that I was appointed a professor at MIT in 1984, I had been teaching for eight years. I felt perfectly comfortable teaching undergraduate students, as I had mentored my first thesis B.S. level student during that time.

While I was a postdoc at Harvard, there was a young African American physics student at MIT, an undergraduate, wanted to write a thesis and he approached me about being his advisor. I believe he had an “official” mentor at MIT, but I’m the person who actually guided his thesis. The young man’s name was Melvin Brown, and I can’t remember which exactly was the year he graduated (sometime between 1977-1980), but his thesis was related to quantum field theory and supersymmetry and I served his actual advisor. That was the first experience in my career of guiding a physics dissertation.

That process was very much like guiding a graduate student because the subject about which he wrote his thesis on was actually a subject that a graduate thesis could have been written about. So I wasn’t really very fearful of taking on graduate students. My next such experience occurred during the period of 1982-1984 while I was at Caltech. A young student whose formal mentor was Murray Gell-Mann, needed an ‘unofficial advisor,’ as Prof. Gell-Mann was busier than ever include a dramatic person challenge. So in my final year as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, I supervised the PhD dissertation of Barton Zwiebach. Barton would later become a tenured physics professor at MIT and the author of what I regard as the best textbook introducing string theory for the seriously interested student.

Not in terms of the technical skills and expertise they would have to develop, because, you know, if you are telling people to get in the race, then you better teach them how to run. You better teach them how to run as fast as anyone else that’s getting involved. So you can’t slack off on the technical route. That has got to be what I do for all my students. For a young person to become a theoretical physicist is analogous to training a young person to become an Olympic athlete. You do no one a favor by lowering your efforts or expectations.

So in the technical training I give my students, there’s no difference at all because if somehow I did more for my African American students than my other students, then I’m actually practicing racism. That is inimical to my internal belief system. So, I have to go flat out in training all of my students in the same quality and level in terms of technical achievement, expertise and skills. What’s different for me I found — for both my African American students and my female students — is I feel a responsibility to tell them about what I have seen as how either their ethnicity or gender is going likely to play out in their careers. That’s what’s different.

Zierler:

Jim, I want to ask a broad question about your undergraduate teaching career at Maryland. So, you mentioned before you were coming out of this Ivy League Northeast bubble and in a certain way, you can include Caltech in that, at least from an elite perspective. Now at a public, large university like Maryland, the aptitude range of undergraduates that you’re going to experience is going to be much wider than it would be at a place like Harvard or MIT at Caltech.

In other words, I would assume that the best undergraduates that you might encounter at Maryland might be just as good as those you would encounter at a place like Harvard or MIT, but they just decided to stay at Maryland for any number of personal reasons, but on the other side, on the lower end, you probably encountered students who were not nearly as well-prepared academically as what you might encounter teaching at a place like Harvard or MIT.

And so the question is, with that broader range of students — both in terms of diversity, socioeconomic background, educational preparation — in what ways did you see that as a challenge for teaching and in what ways did you see that as an opportunity?

Gates:

Well first of all, my answer is probably going to be surprising to you. Well, let me start with part of your question. It is absolutely true the best undergraduate students I met at Maryland were as good as the best students I have ever met at MIT and Harvard and Caltech, almost without exception. That had to be a necessary condition for me to move, right? Because as an associate professor, it is still true you rely on your graduate students to help you drive your career, and if you don’t have that quality of help, you are likely to suffer in your own aspirations.

Zierler:

Right.

Gates:

So it is absolutely true that the best students that I met at Maryland — about which I was ‘figuratively was taking the temperature’ as I was looking at going into the institute — and I convinced myself that that was true — and over my 30 year long career in Maryland — to my satisfaction, that condition was certainly met in my personal assessment. Let me start there.

The biggest difference that I found between students at MIT and — I’m sorry, let me make the distinction. There’s actually a big difference between undergraduate and graduate programs at Ivy League institutions, in fact, a shockingly large difference to me. So, in fact, when we were undergraduate at MIT in physics, we had friends at Harvard in physics and we used to laugh about what they did, quite frankly, because it seemed clear to us that it was not at the same level of what we were doing.

And over the years, the perception that — even I’ve heard from some faculty at Ivy League institutions recently — was that at least in physics, the top undergraduates at the large public Research Institutions (RI’s) probably overall are better, which is kind of a surprise to hear, but that’s certainly my assessment too. If you do some general ranking in physics — I can’t say all disciplines — but in physics, it is hard to say that the Ivy League undergraduate program and students are that much stronger or stronger at all than the ones in the physics programs at the large RI’s.

Graduate school was different. And graduate school had some of the Ivies and that of course includes — when I say Ivies here I mean Ivies plus, so Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, and a few more etc. who are not formally part of the Ivies, but culturally, they’re all the same cohort of institutions. They share the ethos about physics. Then in specific parts of theoretical physics the universe is expanded again, such as with parts of the UC system and the State University of New York-Stony Brook. The graduate programs there are comparable to what I’ve seen the best anywhere, sometimes in specific areas.

But again, that statement does not apply in a blanket matter in the Ivies either. I have spent now four years and here at Brown and although we have high-quality programs, they’re not as large as, for example, Maryland. Maryland has a huge program with excellence in force across many domains. In my experience and observations find excellence perhaps in one domain or so, and many of them, or in a few domains, but not in the broad range that you’ll find at Berkeley or Maryland or places like that.

So I have thought about it and I believe I understand a part of the problem. Well, first of all let’s get one factor — you know, the quality of education that African Americans largely and especially in the science in this country is not comparable to the quality of education for European Americans that would have interest in physics. It begins with the way that public education is financed in the US. That foundation is property taxes usually. Two facts are relevant; the average African American child attends public schools, and the average African American family possesses about fifteen percent of the wealth of the average European American family. It is not rocket science to deduces there will be huge disparate funding gaps in the financial investment in the children of these distinct ethnic groups. On top of that the number of high schools, available to the children of these average families, that offer physics is also very different.

That’s number one. So you’re dealing with, relativity speaking, a much smaller pool of candidates that — the ratio is not just the same as for one racial demographic to another demographic in the general population. The ratio of who obtains a sufficient high school preparation to enter physics (and in the aftermarket) is a number that is extraordinarily small for kids with high quality education.

So, part of it really is the background with which that students arrive, but a larger part of it, in my suspicion, has to do with this effect that’s sometimes called the “cohort” effect. Namely that if you really want a successful program, it is kind of a critical mass of students, African American students especially, that you need in order for them to form a community that’s successful. Looking back at my own career, that’s something I should have understood because in 1969 when I came to MIT as a freshman, there was a sufficient number of us minority that we could form a self-supporting community.

So that’s something that’s talked about in the TEAM-UP report, and I’ve lived it and I’ve seen it. Both being part of it as well as not understanding that lesson and not having success as a result.

Zierler:

I want to come back to your research at this time, but I think it is a good opportunity to talk about your experiences at Howard University. So the first question there is in attempting—there is a diverse student body at Maryland. You do have this attempt to increase representation among African Americans in physics, it is not working.

They explained the new president was coming in and the statements he made about increasing STEM capacity on the campus. Also, they added some other facts that were interesting, this push to increase STEM capacity would likely mean not just a new chairperson for the physics department, but new faculty lines to build capacity in the department. All of that intrigued me, but it was also Jim Lindesay. We had a moment to reflect back to the days we were both MIT undergraduates and both in CCTEP. We formed a small community with a decent number of us to form a self-supporting community at MIT, and Jim was in that community. The student whose undergraduate thesis I mentioned, Mel Brown, was in that community.

In fact, we had this joke at MIT, a room at MIT in the floor under the location of the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), we African American students basically petitioned to get access as it was not apparently being used for other purposes. So we thought of it as our own version of MIT’s CTP. where we would gather and work out problems and, you know, it was a place of community. So one of the debates that we used to have in that facility was what, as an African American, do you do when you get your PhD?

A number of things; you get your PhD, you master research skills and you become a faculty member at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). Some of us said no. You get your PhD and you go to a majority institution and you begin to learn how the system really works, and at an appropriate point in your career, if you’re still interested in making a difference in the African American community, then you should try to make a transition at that point.

Because since I had spent — so we’re talking about ’91 or so — about 14 years in the physics community in the country learning about the traditions, its habits, the way it operates, funding — one of the things about segregation is that people who are segregated against do not have opportunity to learn these things. If you’re going to try to make a difference — as we used to argue even at MIT — you actually need to know how the system works. If you’re isolated from the system, you just don’t have access to this knowledge.

Well, I had been part of trained in how our larger physics community works and so I had hoped that that would have allowed me to make a difference at Howard University because Howard has fantastic school spirit. I realized that in that spirit — when I was doing this assessment of the department was blown away especially by the students. So, to me, the potential was there.

During the two years I was at Howard, however, we did make some progress. We fought a very long pitch battle with the Department of Energy, which is a series of stories by itself, but to get an affiliation between Howard University and the Argonne National Laboratory where there is located a multi-disciplinary science and engineering center and accelerators. At the height of this battle, we were told, “There are no Affirmative Action beamlines at the laboratory.” That was fine with me as I had come looking for the usual type. Perhaps one day I will more about this period in my career. When I went to Howard, in fact, we were already thinking about poaching an African American scholar from Bell Labs, a gentleman by the name of Walker Lowe. In fact, we were successful in that.

So again, it is bringing this outside expertise into an HBCU. So we were in the process of implementing this strategy and some of the outright racist pushback that we got from DOE, as I said, is another set of stories that maybe one day I’ll comment about, but we were successful in the end. And in fact, I was only at Howard for two years, and this babble took longer than two years.

I was on a plane to Europe before I found out we had won because I was reading Black Enterprise magazine on an airplane crossing the Atlantic when I read a story wherein there was announced the largest research grant that the Department of Energy had ever made to an HBCU had been initiated and it was this thing that I had been fighting for two years, so we actually won that.

As I said on other occasions, there’s a whole bunch of just ridiculous “antebellums,” the types of stories about the racism that I saw directed toward HBCUs, but we won that one. Additionally, I personally took the lead in creating a new research center at Howard. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a request for proposals (RPF) out for creating essentially what the National Science Foundation describes as Centers of Excellence. This was the NASA version of the Centers of Excellence.

They wanted to create that specifically at HBCUs and so I organized a symposium on campus where essentially what I was looking at it is not just the capacity within the physics department, but the capacity across all the STEM disciplines on campus, to try to create a coherent program where we would put in a proposal that could succeed in this competition. I led the creation of a two-day symposium held in the major auditorium on campus. Faculty members from across the campus were invited to make presentations where I, and a few of my colleagues, were making notes. There were other people in the audience watching and being made aware of some of the latent research on campus.

What I perceived from this activity was that there was a sufficient aligning of skills in the physics department, the chemistry department, and the engineering department to write a grant around the study of atmospheric science. So, though I am not an atmospheric scientist, but the training that I had about grant-writing and managing, I brought to bear in creating this proposal. And so we created the Center for the Study of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Atmospheres. (CSTEA). It was all around atmospheric science, but the extraterrestrial meant stars, but in those three departments, there was a coherent program that I could put together.

The proposal was successful and I was the first director of the Howard University CSTEA . I was very proud of that accomplishment because I had moved completely out of my own comfort zone in terms of expertise as a mathematical physicist after all, right? “You don’t want me in your laboratory, trust me, you don’t want me in your laboratory.” But yet, that apprenticeship that I had served at MIT, Harvard, Caltech, and Maryland came to bear and we put together a program which exists to this very day, by the way.

So those are the kinds of infrastructure-building things that I went to Howard as what I wanted to accomplish, but in the end, I returned to Maryland because the administration at Howard did not live up to some commitments that had been personally made to bring me there. And earlier, you heard me say that I believe in the reciprocity that our law and institution to hold me to its standards, but then the reciprocity is that I hold them to mine. If you don’t meet my requirements, I don’t — you know, I try to find the possibility to achieve my circumstances. And so that’s what I did in returning to Maryland.

Zierler:

Jim, I want to ask, your experience at Howard—ever since you left high school, you were operating in vastly white majority environments, right? What did you learn about yourself during your time at Howard that you might not have ever learned if you had not had that experience? Both in terms of teaching predominantly African American undergraduates, faculty meetings, graduate students. You weren’t that different at Howard. And so I’m curious what did you learn about yourself that you might never have realized had you just stayed at Maryland?

Gates:

You know, I’m not sure I learned much of anything about me. I learned about the environment, certainly I think in our earlier conversations, I was the past president of the National Society of Black Physicists, so I had many friends at HBCUs and had visited campuses prior to my going to Howard, but teaching at Howard—I guess for me the bright stars were the quality of the students is just, like I said—of course you meet students who are terribly under-prepared and so you have to try to figure out how to meet their needs, but the quality of the best students in terms of THE quality of mind was so uplifting. I saw so much of that there.

I was just extraordinarily happy to try to be a doorway through such students walk to a brighter future. This has always been my philosophy about teaching is that I should be a door through which students can walk to a bright future of their own creation. That’s one of my fundamental motivations. Seeing that for the largest number — certainly in terms of concentration of African American students — was the first time this had happened in my life, being at a HBCU. So that was very rewarding and fulfilling.

One of the other interesting things is that that was the first time in my life the majority of my really great students were female was at Howard University. So that alerted me that something was going to change in the general society because it often turns out that the African American community is kind of a warning bell about trends that are going on in society, and it certainly lived up in that case where we see, of course, much more gender equitable environment in physics than we did in 1991 and ’92 when I was at Howard, but I saw it among my students first at Howard and not any place else. So those were wonderful things to see developing.

The big difference that I’ve seen in physics departments is not so much ethnically, but it is about size. Large physics departments have a culture that’s really different from small physics departments, and that was emphasized for me again at Howard because we had 14 faculty members around that size, so that’s relatively small, but that meant that we had at least many multiple of 14 in terms of opinions about any particular question.

Zierler:

Were you welcomed back to Maryland with open arms? Was there some concern that you had turned your back on them?

Gates:

No, because you see, someone there — and I name that someone below — there in College Park “had integrated my equations of motion” and had a sufficient amount of accurate information about what was the most likely outcome and that’s why I was permitted to take the leave of absence. It was Brit Kirwan who did that calculation. So, you know, when I came back, he was not surprised.

Zierler:

And back on the research side, what’s the status of supersymmetry and supergravity during these years?

Gates:

OK. So, it is interesting that you should ask that question. So, this is like ’91, ’92 — those are the academic years that I was at Howard — and the interest in string theory was still very high. Young string theorists were being hired very prolifically by physics departments. Even Harvard and MIT had kind of figured out that string theory and supersymmetry were good things in which to invest. They were hiring some of these young people, a few years after ‘I was on the market.’ No one approached me about coming back, which was just fine. I was having fun doing what I was doing at College Park and was quite pleased with my physics.

In fact, at Howard during this period, I had a postdoc by the name of Hitoshi Nishino and we wrote a series of papers that are among — for me — works that to this very day are among the ones I’m most proud in my career because we anticipated things that, a decade later, the rest of the physics community would figure out were important. There is a class of theories called supersymmetic Chern-Simons theories. Hitoshi and I actually wrote the first papers in this area with extended supersymmetry when I was at Howard University. Over a decade would pass before other researchers “discovered” these equations. These days, these equations are known as the ABJM (an acronym taken the first letters of the last names of these discoverers; Ofer Aharony, Oren Bergman, Daniel Jafferis, and Juan Maldacena) Model.

So we were ahead of the curve on those things. String theory had not quite broken into the public consciousness, but it was certainly very powerful and dominant among theoretical physicists. That started from a conference around 1985 at Argonne. There had been this meeting and it was sort of like the Woodstock of theoretical physics. String theory certainly burst into people’s consciousness and so that was still sort of true in 1992 and 1993, the after-effect of that.

Zierler:

Did you stay with these topics throughout your tenure at Maryland? Did you take on new fields of interest?

Gates:

I took on new fields of interest when I returned to Maryland. Let me think. When I returned to Maryland, which was 1993, I started teaching again, graduate, undergraduate courses, but in terms of physics, I started thinking about the fact that there are some problems that at that point had not been solved. A few years later, I was appointed the Toll Professor of Physics. I was an endowed professor, and as an endowed professor, the endowment really allowed me to do research that I didn’t have to explain to other people.

Due to that freedom, I began pursuing questions that nobody else in the field was investigating. Some of these questions have not been resolved to this very day, but I started looking at them using techniques no one had ever thought about using before. We started using graph theory, which is a topic in computer science and mathematics, and we found the equations that most people think about as differential equations can be thought about as networks, the kind of networks that computer scientists study.

We gave these networks a name, calling them adinkras, which is a word that comes from west Africa—if you look many places in my publication record, you’ll see this strange word. In those early days, along with my first female (and to that date, only) PhD student named Lubna Rana, we had begun studying supersymmetry and noticed that in every such system of equations we could study, these unexpected matrices were somehow buried within the equations. So that alerted me, there’s something interesting here.

That all started in that period after my return to Maryland. We didn’t fully understand the importance of adinkras as networks until a decade later, but the first realization of this structure was actually in that period.

Zierler:

I asked you before about computers, was this new interest influenced by all of the advancements that had been made in computational technology to that point?

Gates:

No, not at that point because computers still were not powerful enough to really provide a lever for progress in the kinds of questions I was interested in answering. As I said, we saw the structure, but we did not anticipate that it would lead to computers — information theory, and technology types of questions and methods for attacking forcefully the questions that arose.

Zierler:

Now, is graph theory a natural outgrowth from your previous interests or did you see this as a new endeavor all together?

Gates:

The graph theory interests happened a decade later around 2005. It was totally unexpected until it happened. To this, I owe a great debt of gratitude to another physicist, a gentleman by the name of Michael Faux. In 2005, I was in the country of Georgia, a couple of hundred miles north of Tehran, Iran attending a conference. Since the Internet connections were good, every day I was following my usual habit of checking what were the latest ideas that posted at the arXiv, which as you probably know, is the virtual location where the theoretical physics committee holds its daily communal conversation.

One day, I saw a paper by Michael and his collaborator Donald Spector. It was strangely indicative of those matrices discovered about ten years earlier. Thus, I sent him a electronic message saying, “Gee, this is funny. This is kind of like something I found.” Michael and I then began a conversation via e-mail sending questions back and forth and answers-&-answers. Michael kept a fairly detailed set of notes. About six weeks later, I was in a west African country of either Benin or Mali and our questions had evolved into a research paper.

So, it was with that research paper — that’s the first time this word adinkra appears on my resume — and the reason we used it was actually due to Michael. He was in the Czech Republic the entire time we were sending these email questions back and forth. Michael wasn’t even in America as I was to learn subsequently. In fact, he was later to remind me that the two of us had met previously at a conference in the middle of Siberia, Russia! In those years, he was quite a world traveler.

Though he is not African American, he had stepped onto the African continent a decade before I had ever gone there. So he knew a lot about African culture. When we finally discovered these networks that had graphical representations, we were looking for names for them and Michael suggested the name. Part of the reason he may have come up with this was because he knew I was in Africa at the time. That is the story of how these networks and graph theory mathematical objects I research acquired their name.

Zierler:

What has been exciting about graph theory? In what ways has it moved the broader field forward?

Gates:

Well, some people would argue it hasn’t. We think it has because we’ve been able to do things that other people have not or cannot do. The strongest indication occurred in four papers written in the 2019-2020 period along with my first PhD students at Brown University, Ms. Sze-Ning (Hazel) Mak and Ms. Yangrui Hu.

The most complicated form of supergravity theories is called “eleven dimensional supergravity.” As this name suggests, it is an extension of the type of mathematical theory I began studying as a graduate student. It was created in 1978 by two French physicists, Eugen Cremmer and Barnard Julia. Strings are intrinsically quantum mechanical theories. Since supergravity theories are not a complete version of string theory, their relation to such quantum theories is not as direct as one might imagine.

According to the approach to quantum theory created by two Nobel recipients, Paul A. M. Dirac and Richard P. Feynman, when a symmetry like supersymmetry is present, it is at a minimum convenient to note its consistency with a formulation known as the “Direc-Feynman Path Integral.” This was not true of any of the original constructions of supergravity theories. Later extensions of these original constructions were finally shown to possess this property. The was first shown by the German physicist, Peter Breitenlohner in 1977 for the original supergravity theories created by the two separate research groups of Ferrara, Freedman, and van Nieuwenhuizen (as one group) and Deser, and Zumino (as the other).

In the output of the collaboration consisting of Hazel, Yangrui and me, for the first time in the field, the extension of the type discovered by Breitenlohner has now been found for eleven-dimensional supergravity. One reason why it took over forty years to discover such a solution is because of the tremendous numbers of functions required for the solution. Our solution evolves about 4.3 billion functions! This definitely could not have been found ‘by hand.’ But we had a conceptual advantage also. We were able to such a solution because the use of adinkra-based ideas that suggested a path to a solution that more conventional approaches had not. Since adinkras are graphs, it is natural to use techniques associated with graphs. This also leads to what a computer scientist named Symour Papert (1928-2016) called “computational thinking” (CT). Interestingly enough, CT has emerged as a topic of some debate in STEM education (a topic on which we will discuss later). One definition of CT in education is as a set of perspective and problem-solving methodologies by expressing problems in and their resolution in terms that can be used to create computer algorithms for solution. This is precisely what Hazel, Yangrui, and I have done. The final outcome of our efforts was the design and creation of algorithms that run using Wolfram Mathematica, a software system that we run on laptop computers.

To me, that is all the proof. If you can bring new knowledge into a field by solving a problem that has stymied the field for decades, then you must be doing something right. So how has it moved things forward? Well, these adinkra graphs—what’s really funny is that this is what Abdus Salam was trying to tell me—

Zierler:

Yes, I was going to ask. Right.

Gates:

It was so bizarre that he was right. So the primary source for our success was because using adinkra concepts we were able to frame the question differently from others. So it was about the framing. Complicated mathematical questions may be posed in many ways. Depending on the formulation utilized sometimes makes it more amenable to find the answers. There are questions in supersymmetry, which is what I know about, that you can formulate in this—what I earlier called superspace, which is what our 1084 book is entitled. But many of these questions can also be posed using the concepts of adinkras as I have been doing so since 2005.

Interestingly, the idea of superspace was actually invented by Salam and another physicists, John Strathdee of New Zealand. So this is a terribly convoluted story, but you can certainly use—so I’m going to use this hand for Salam’s superspace—so you can certainly use superspace and that’s been the conventional tool most of the research community has used with geometrical arguments to study supersymmetry, but with Michael Faux, we created a different lens of networks and adinkras. One can ask questions over here using Salam-Strathdee superspace, but you can also ask the same questions over there using networks and graphs.

For about forty years it was not possible using superspace (nor any other technique) to achieve a breakthrough path of Breitenlohner’s resolution of the ‘Dirac-Feynman Path Integral’ with the 11D part of M-Theory called ‘eleven-dimensional supergravity.’ So if one asked the question of how well these to concepts were understood. It turns out the answer is not very well…up until this year in my opinion.

Now due to the effort I have made along with my two Brown University PhD students, we were able to show if you think about this same question using network-based adinkra ideas, a solution was found. It is highly likely that if we had continued along the traditional path, like all who have previously asked this question using Salam & Strathdee’s superspace, we would not have been able to find an answer. So, this illustrated the importance of Salam’s advice to me about the importance of diversity of viewpoints. It is perhaps ironic that I rejected his idea about superspace but accepted the one about diversity of viewpoint that was the key.

Zierler:

So what’s the answer? What do we know now that we didn’t know before as a result of this?

Gates:

In physics every breakthrough discovery is but the first to tackle the next problem. One thing we know is that it is possible to follow the path of Breitenlohner in the issue of making 11D supergravity (11D SUGRA) consistent with the approach of Dirac and Feynman. This may seem trivial, but many other physicists have regarded this as an impossibility.

Let me try to tell you the answer in the form of a story. I can tell you it in the form of a story. I thought I had mentioned before, but maybe I didn’t. Imagine that there was some aliens flying by in a starship and observing humans, in fact, they might only be observing physicists trying to figure out how M-Theory. Next assume one of the physicists on earth — and let’s assume it is Ed Witten, to make the story even more science fiction — made a mistake in some M-Theory calculation. Now, of course, Ed doesn’t make mistakes, but this is science fiction.

The aliens might wish to be helpful and want to communicate to Ed what were the mistakes. In order to do that — because they’re in a spaceship flying by near the speed of light or something — they have to take Einstein’s Relativity Theory into account to communicate the correct answers. Until we uncovered our answer this year, there would have been no way to write a dictionary for that communication. That’s what we’ve done.

Zierler:

In what ways has your work advanced the long-term goal of unifying gravity into the rest of physics?

Gates:

So earlier, I mentioned that working with Warren Siegel when he was at Maryland in the middle 80s, we were able to show that you’re not forced into the idea of writing string theories in more than four dimensions, that you can stay within four dimensions and use the idea of strings and write theories that are built on the principles of the Standard Model. That’s the way to describe our work.

Because of that — now our work is not totally complete as there’s a hole in our work that I don’t know how to answer — in the future this could be very important to imply that our physics can conceptually and philosophically be freed from dwelling conceptual ‘jail’ with the burden of considering extra dimensions. If someone answers the hole, using string theory will become like using the mathematics of Standard Model, and because of string theory, it automatically includes gravity.

Zierler:

When President Obama was elected president, did you have a sense that you were going to get involved in the administration in one form or another?

Gates:

[laugh] You have got be kidding. All throughout the summer of the campaign, I was traveling to different parts of the world. I encountered numbers of people who asked me did I think that he had a chance to win? Initially I responded, “I don’t think so.” However, at some point my answer was, “It is like trying to send a rocket to the moon. It is really hard, but the U.S. actually did that. So we might actually do it in the case of President Obama. It is like a moonshot in the space race.” So I — like most African Americans my age, David — we were stunned that he was successful.

So let me tell you a story from back at my time as a graduate student at MIT. There was a part of the physics building where we black students used to gather to shave our internal discussions. We gave it a half comical/half serious name the way, the ‘Colored Center for Theoretical and Experimental Physics,’ CCTEP. It was the venue of many great debates. Once in CCTEP, we asked the question “What do you think is going to happen first? An African American is going to get a Nobel Prize in physics or an African American is going to be elected President of the United States?” One should keep in mind this occurred sometime during the period of 1973-1977.

We literally asked this question—and so we were stunned, at least people my age, were absolutely stunned that President Obama was successful elected. And if it had not been for the stock market crash, it probably would have never happened. So, an extraordinary circumstance had to come into existence, an unforeseeable circumstance for this to happen.

Back in those CCTEP discussions I had always said, “It’ll happen first with Nobel Prize.” I had erroneously ascribed greater power to logic. I was and am of the opinion that theories of racial superiority are bogus. Apparently there seemed at the time to me that more progress toward far competition was occurring in fields like science great than in the sphere of politics but it didn’t happen with the Nobel Prize. It happened on the side of electing the first African American president. So that was the number one reason that I was extraordinarily stunned — and that’s why there was such a deep outpouring of emotion in the African American community because, David, we know this country. You know, we’ve been here 400 years. Our culture has been created by this country.

So we also, therefore, know how deeply racism is part of this country. And none of us, in our logic, had seen how that could happen. So I was stunned and I thought, “Oh, you know, the country’s not the place that I had in my theories about it. It is a different place and I need to start to rethink about what is this strange thing called the United States of America?”

So, no. I had zero anticipation of becoming involved with President Obama’s administration, although in January after the election, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun and it is about the significance of President Obama’s election, but even then I had no idea that I would be involved in any way whatsoever.

No, that’s right. He was not the Director of the National Cancer Institute. I think he was still probably out at NIH, I believe. I typed back, “Happy to talk, just tell me what would be a good time because I’m sure your schedule is probably much more complicated than my own.” Another week goes by and I don’t hear from Harold. As I’m on my way to give a colloquium at University of Florida in Gainesville in the physics department, and off the plane, my mobile phone rings and it is Harold. My obvious response, “Harold, you keep sending these messages saying you want to talk to me but you never talk.” He says, “Well, do you have a few minutes now?” I respond with, “Yes.”

I was walking through the airport with my mobile phone to my ear and Harold said, “Jim, if you were to receive an invitation to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, what would your answer be?” To me, the first thing that went off in my head is that that’s a very interesting formulation. The question was asked in a conditional format. That means that if I say no, it gives Harold the right to say we never invited him. Immediately that flashed in my head as sort of music inside. I didn’t say anything about it, but I thought about it instantaneously. Perhaps, it was a joke was my next thought…a rather strange one.

Next, however, he made me understand that he was serious. My reaction was physical. This was one of the few times in my life when literally my knees went weak and I had to put a hand against the wall not to fall over. So no, I had no such expectation.

My trip to India was either in February or March. Unknown to me at the time, my name had been debated for this appointment since the previous January. Apparently the ‘Public Understanding of Science Award’ from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I received in 2006 and associated activities had put me on the radar of leadership of PCAST. In a very strange way, I owe this outcome to Albert Einstein and his remarkable output in the year of 1905.

The year of 2005 was named the “Einstein World Year of Physics” (WYP) in recognition of Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis – ‘Year of Miracles’ that took place a century earlier. As a consequence, my year of 2006 was extraordinarily odd. I gave thirty-seven talks about Einstein on six contents! By December of 2005 I have alerted to the fact that the WYP was likely to be…usual and I had acquired over a dozen books on Einstein as it seemed likely I would be receiving many related invitations. I did. I even did something else that year in the middle of travel. Since I was on so many flights, during the summer I circumnavigated the globe by stringing together a number of such air-trips while constantly travelling eastward. On these trips there was one constant companion. Walter Isaacson, whom I had known for a number of years, asked me to review the physics in his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Thus, when President Barack H. Obama introduced his PCAST in a program held at the National Academies of Sciences building in Washington, DC that spring. I would be among his group of councilors. My ‘Uncle Albert’ had played his role in making sure I would be meeting a newly installed President. This was the second time in my life for such an occurrence. In 1999, a visit by Stephen Hawking has been the initiating event that triggered an eventual meeting for both me and my wife, Dianna, to meet President Clinton and the first lady in the White House.

Zierler:

Well as I said, my first reaction was deer caught in headlights. Not sure why I’m there, not sure why I was called to do this. Couldn’t say no because — one of the things I’ve said to people is what American, given the opportunity, what American do you know who could say no to that? Could you say no to try to contribute to this country that has given so much to you. What American can say no to the opportunity?

So I was committed to trying to do my best. It very quickly became apparent to me that one of — and this came from the president also — that one of the things that he was extraordinarily interested in was education in science, technology, and engineering and mathematical fields, the so-called STEM fields.

It became very clear that that was supposed to — there was no formal assignment of portfolios in PCAST but it was very clear to me it was the expectation that would be one of my primary portfolios to carry. And so on all four of the STEM reports — there was an arc of four reports that PCAST completed in that period of 2009-2016, I was always one of the lead authors on every single one of those reports. I did not serve as a lead on other reports, but I was very active on a number. A complete record of the Obama PCAST reports can be seen at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreports on-line.

Of the thirty-seven reports, in addition to the ones were I was a lead author, there are six others where I was part of the writing team to create the reports. It was a very exciting time I my life within the domain of policy. In a sense, it felt as though I was subjected to an experience similar to receiving a graduate degree in public policy.

Zierler:

What kind of access to data or just sort of having a much bigger purview in terms of national trends — how did that access to that information change what you had known intrinsically in your own life and experiences up to that point?

Gates:

It filled in the numbers, in some sense. As you had mentioned, for my life experience, I had broad stroke understandings of STEM education in this country from being a product of the system and thinking about it because I’ve taught students — so in 2009 from 1972 I’ve taught students in HBCUs, in large publics, in Ivy leagues. So, you’re right. My life lived experience gave me broad strokes understanding, but now I had access to data. That’s what I mean by it filled in the numbers. In particular, I have taught in a number of diverse institutions that include Brown University, Caltech, Gustavus Adolphus College, Howard University, M.I.T., and the University of Maryland.

So because of that, I think John’s judgment that I could contribute and reasonably make way to bring forth insights in this because I’m not just an educator. I’m someone out there at the very weird end of doing string theory — I probably had some capacity to do this in a way that was probably unique.

Zierler:

To what extent were you working on physics issues specifically during your tenure in Washington?

Gates:

Well first of all, since I lived at College Park, I was always — let me put it this way, I spent more time in Washington, DC during that seven year-long period than I had spent in the 20 years beforehand. That was absolutely true that I was — I learned Washington in a way I had never learned living from 1984 to 2009 in the area. I had spent that entire time in College Park and surrounding environs, right? But I really didn’t know Washington until I joined PCAST. I’m sorry, ask your question again because I need a second to think about this.

Zierler:

Obviously you were there to work on STEM issues and representation, but you’re also there because you’re a physicist. And so I’m curious if you saw specific opportunity to advance your own interest or you saw an opportunity to increase physics research as part of the national conversation?

Gates:

Right, thank you. So again, I did not understand what would — I did not see how what I was doing for PCAST aligned with my own personal interests. I guess what’s really funny is I did not understand that I was becoming a ‘policy wonk’. I did realize now I was put into position to make policy statements that were backed up by both experience and data. I did not understand that at the beginning.

I just thought of myself as part of the collective, that you know, there’s this fantastic group of people around President Obama and we’re going to be anonymous, so people will simply say the White House issues report X, Y, or Z, that we would not — in some sense — be drawn out, but of course that’s not what happened because when you write these reports, your colleagues on campuses see your name and they say, “Oh, I know X.” And then you get invited to be a face representing the efforts of the White House in this domain.

And so only later in the process did I understand that I was literally growing another leg in my own professional career attributes, which became quite intense for a while, and to this day, still functions, which is why my appointment here in Providence is partially in the Watson Institute because of the public policy.

In the period of time so far in my service on the executive line of the American Physical Society, it has turned out that my PCAST experience has provided an amazing resource that I have drawn upon to provide best quality of leadership I am capable of delivering. That experience was of particular importance with regards to the challenges that were presented to the APS, first with regard to its operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and second the environment created in US society generally with the regards to the continue disparate treatment and opportunities given to its citizen on the basis of racial discriminations. These have been challenges neither I nor anyone could have foreseen in 2016 when I allowed my name to be put into nomination for the APS Vice-Presidency.

Zierler:

Jim, thinking back to your strategic thinking as you were developing a dissertation topic, I can’t help but wonder that at some point, you recognized, maybe from a point of cynicism, that in Washington, you write a report, wonderful. And then it gets shelved and nothing happens as a result, right? So in thinking in your talents of strategy and working with people, what opportunities did you see that the work that you had been given, there was opportunity there not just to write a report, but to make a difference with what the report actually said?

Gates:

David, you’re telepathic. You’re now going into John Holdren’s mind.

Zierler:

So the major things that I — watching all along, but I had no chance to participate — would put my finger on is information theory. So there are a number of questions. The simplest way I can phrase this is we’ve all heard of these things called black holes and if some ordinary matter passes inside of the ‘event horizon,’ it gets sucked into that black hole. Matter is actually information because you have information about positions of molecules, atoms, electrons, locations and velocity and the molecular bonds. Naively if a bit of matter is ‘sucked’ into a Black Hole all that information at first glance would seem to be irretrievably lost. Many physicists, including the late Stephen Hawking, believe there is an inseparable bond between information and energy and a loss of information would imply the non-conservation of energy! In fact, there was a long ‘war’ on this subject between Lenny Susskind of Stanford University and Stephen Hawking.

If something gets sucked into a black hole, that means information is actually getting lost from the universe. This is actually a very great conceptual puzzle. And so one of the things that grew up in the spirit when I was sort of just watching was this whole debate about the role of information theory and black holes, and by the way, this is also coming from string theory, by the way, because string theory — actually this can be traced back to Hawking — but the point is that string theory has been the only tool that we know that seems it might help resolve this so-called loss of information paradox.

It is generally believed [that] you need actually a theory of quantum gravity to figure out whether the information is really disappearing or whether there is some kind of conservation of information and if there’s a conservation of information, how does the universe accomplish that? And in string theory, there is a suggestion for how this is done, by the way. And that’s another reason why when people say, “Oh, string theory is mathematics.” No, it is not mathematics, folks. It is asking questions that no other piece of mathematics allows us to try to answer about the way the universe works.

This is another example I talked about quantum mechanics and calculation – this is another set of calculations. So string theory is quite healthy because though the public doesn’t know this — most people outside of fundamental physics don’t know about this — but those ones who are in the game, they’re perfectly aware of it. So, I had been watching this and that’s one thing I thought was really fascinating was the role of information theory, but it turns out these graphs that I had been working on, they are tools from information theory. However, my actual work on adinkras comes at the issue of information theory in an entirely different and distinct direction.

So, I’ve recently had some discussions, for example, with Stephen Wolfram, about our approach versus things that he’s doing, that in some ways look very, very similar to our graph theory approaches. So, I was able to rev up that part of my research, again, and wrap it around some issues around the evolving discussion of quantum error-correcting codes (QECC). So, I’m probably more productive now than I have been in some number of years. I wrote eleven papers in 2020.

Zierler:

Has Brown been a unique experience in the sense that it is not quite an MIT and it is not quite a Maryland? Do you see it as its own kind of animal?

Gates:

Yes, I do. And Dartmouth also, to some degree. I tell people that institutions are like living organic species, they all have an evolution attached to them. And in fact, if you look at physics in this country, there’s this great book called The Physicists by Daniel Kevles, I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but it basically is the history of physics in the United States and I read it when I was a postdoc at Caltech. It is a wonderful story about how physics came to its current position. I still highly recommend it.

This is actually a book that probably needs to be updated these days, but it covers the history of physics in the United States from the beginning of the country to the 1980s. That book gave me an appreciation many, many years ago that institutions evolve. If you look at universities in our country, when I was a graduate student, I told you that we used to laugh about Harvard, about our friends that studied physics at Harvard because it was clear to us that the quality of the education that they were getting was not the MIT standard.

Well, across disciplines was where Harvard, at that time, did not have very robust program in were a number of STEM disciplines. Not at the level that MIT did, certainly. That changed around the time that I became a postdoc at Harvard. They began to understand — and the way from my lens of understanding — there’s a company in Cambridge called Genentech, which is one of the first bio-genetic technology companies that came out of a university in this country.

As a junior fellow, I actually knew some of the people that started Genentech. Harvard — because of the Genentech experience — started to understand that increase opportunity and wealth was going to be attached to STEM disciplines in a way that had not occurred beforehand, and they started making investments in genetics and biology, in computer science, and that triggered within the Ivy League a cascade effect.

Yale, which has sort of been in this game even longer than Harvard, upped its role of investment. So among the Ivies during my lifetime, there’s this trajectory where they move a little bit away from their traditional strengths in non-STEM areas and come invest more in STEM areas in their own long-term financial welfare benefit. In the Ivy leagues, the institutions that have been the latest to pick up on this were Dartmouth and Brown. So that’s where Dartmouth and Brown are in my estimation, but both of them actually understand the need to do this and are striving tremendously. By the way, this trend can even be seen in smaller traditional liberal arts institutions.

So, I realized that morning, the disaster that — I mean, I did not think the disaster would be a pandemic. So, I can’t say that I had that kind of precision, but I knew it was going to be something awful and I knew that the kind of management skills that I saw would contribute to it even making it worse than it would have been under other circumstances.

So now here we are, and I still have very great trepidations. I still have the dream that I’m going to resign and say, “Folks, I don’t want to do this.” Because I know how terrible this is going to be. This was, for me, the dawning of how bad this would be occurred in February because that’s when — I told you a story that two of us in the executive leadership basically led the effort to shut down our March meeting — so at that point, I was already — I knew how awful it would be.

Then with the business of the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the Black Lives Movement, I mean, none of us signed up for this. So I’m in a struggle to try to do the best I can for my community of physicists, and so far, the feedback I’ve gotten from people who have watched my performance and execution of duties and obligations — both with respect to the pandemic as well as this call for moving policy to get us to a better place to remove barriers for African American participation, and Federal policy that threatens international collaboration — my colleagues, to my joy, think that I have a measured but committed approach to making a difference.

So high energy physics has been nearby or in a crisis for a while, in my opinion. You know, the analogy that people use — which I think is quite apt — about the history of medieval cathedral guilds and the Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais and its collapse and what have you — so high energy physics, in particular, is in a sort of cul-de-sac. This is not something I’ve actually thought about, quite frankly, what we’re going to do about trying to move high energy physics along. However, this is an extremely creative and innovative community.

Look, there’s some micro things that I think are the right things to be doing, so let me talk about the micro things. So there’s an experiment at CERN called LHCB — I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it — but they’re looking for anomalous imprecision measurements. To me, that’s one of the things that I think is extraordinarily important for high energy physics.

The program at Fermilab — which is again, a program around precision in neutrino measurements — that, to me, is a place where if people just said, “Jim, you could control the program of high energy physics,” that’s where I would be directing my attention and resources because as I wrote in my — I wrote an essay — let me look that up. Give me one second.

Can you see that? [shares screen]

Zierler:

Yes, I can.

Gates:

This is an essay as you can see called “Is String Theory Phenomenologically Viable?” It was written in 2006 and what I said in this essay — although I am absolutely convinced supersymmetry is going to ultimately be vindicated — is experimentally, if I could live a hundred years or so, that would be the time scale that we might have to wait to find it.

So this whole approach that the community has taken of building things like the LHCB and now thinking about even larger machines, I think it is actually risky. I would prefer to see that we look at precision experiments, like LHCB, like the neutrino program, and use those to try to push the boundaries on the high energy physics, as well as the approach — just let me stop sharing this — as well as the approaches of astrophysics and high energy astrophysics because right now we are — in my opinion — in a cul-de-sac.

I think it would be more difficult and the reason is because I was fortunate enough to be born at a time when our society had a focused interest on science and had the confidence to have the societal belief that we could trust and in fact trust is actually the right word — we could trust experts to move the country as a whole forward.

So, I know that you’ve interacted with, Mary [Sutton]. Mary’s been saying this for months and months to me, it is like, “What are you going to do when Joe shows up at your door?” And so, at this point in time, David, I don’t have an answer. It was 11 years ago when I was invited to serve on PCAST, 2009. It would be 10 years if they were to come and ask me after the election.

I was around sixty years-old when they first asked me about joining the Obama PCAST. I’d be seventy if there was a return. Although it may not look like it, my body knows that the time has passed — I’m very much aware of the physical changes in my body. I don’t know if I would be up to the level of physical stress — there actually was a physical stress component to serving at PCAST. If you look at my pictures at the beginning, I had black hair. If you look at the pictures at the end, my hair is white and I don’t think that that was only just biological.

During that period, I was diagnosed with hypertension. That was really funny because I was suffering from the disorder without knowing what was going on. I knew something was wrong, and when we finally got a diagnosis from a nephrologist, she said, “Mr. Gates, do you do anything that has a lot of stress attached to it?” I broke into laughter. [laugh] I said, “Well, if you think advising the President of the United States might be a stressor, the answer’s yes.” She said, “Do you do that?” And I said, “Yes, that’s one of the things I do.”

Well, I’m not being fatalistic. Like I said, I think I’m a realist. You know my story, my mother died when I was eleven, so I’ve known I was going to die since I was that age and I have long been OK with that. I know for a lot of people they’re very uncomfortable in talking and thinking about death. This has never been the case with me. So, I always — in fact, that has always actually, in some sense, worked to my advantage because I knew I didn’t have time to waste. I knew that there’s a finite time that if I was going to do something, it had to actually get done. I had to be thinking about that. To me, that’s one of the things in my life I actually — I mean, it was painful, but it did something good for me.

So I began with that premise, that my time is running out. I’m very much aware of that. So, what is it that I want to leave? Well, on the science part, I’ve said that — hold on a second. Let me see how to phrase this. In terms of my science, I want to have left something that is profoundly mathematical, but simultaneously describes something accurately deeply in the heart of nature. Maybe those kind of markings we described as “rilles” in the cosmology microwave background, maybe that will be it because that is the only thing I’ve ever written about, that there would be a clear signal yes or no. I am hopeful my ideas around adinkras will find Nature’s favor in the history of science and its sociology.

So that’s in science. I think I’ve actually done that. And the other part of that quest for legacy is in these weird graphs that I’ve done because if supersymmetry is found, the computer codes that we have found in the mathematics of these things will not just be in mathematics, they will somehow be at the heart of nature. So those are the two things that I’ve done in my career that if I had the possibility to come back as a ghost, say 200 years from now, I would want one of those two things to have been true and been accurate. And I would be, “Yes, that’s what I went into science for.”

So the science is pretty clear to me, but those are the two possibilities that I would have left that have a real shot at saying that Jim found that deep thing in mathematics that was an accurate description of nature. In some sense, that’s always what I’ve wanted to do, David.

In the mathematics, well, these things that I call adinkras and some associated ideas that are actually completely new mathematical ideas, I would hope that they would flourish by drawing mathematicians to study them more deeply. So, in that domain, I’ve got some finite requests from whatever, from the universe, right? And we’ve actually completed that work, essentially. If I die tomorrow, that stuff can be all sorted out by future generations. So that’s the science in that.

Gates:

Well thank you very much. Let me thank you for reaching out because I’m hedging my bets. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, David, and many of the things that we’ve had this conversation about would die with me. I’m hedging my bets in this conversation that if I don’t have enough time to get to this biography — because that’s the other thing I left off my to-do list. I do want to actually write an autobiography that would be useful to people, but I’ve got to do this at a time when I can do it. So, I’m hedging my bets a little bit by talking to you.

Zierler:

If our talk serves as a kernel for that ultimate autobiography, that would be one of the great professional honors of my life, so I very much would be looking forward to that.

Gates:

Thank you. We’ll see how it all works out.

Zierler:

All right, Jim, it has been great. Thank you so much.

Gates:

Bye-bye.