Stories from Black Physicists in Our Collections: Part Three

Quick:
When I was at Catholic University, I worked with Dr. Aki Roberge at Goddard, and she’s still there and still serves as a great mentor. And Aki was a postdoc at the time, which was pretty interesting. I think I was her very first graduate student. And she was studying exoplanets. She was in the stellar astrophysics and exoplanets lab. And we were studying star formation and trying to figure out at what time during star formation did their planetary systems form. And I thought that that was really cool, but I also started thinking about planets and thinking about, gosh, it would be nice to characterize the environments on the surfaces of these planets. Well, back then this was maybe 2007? 2006-2007, all the planets that we were finding as I’m sure you know were hot Jupiters. So these large gaseous planets that don’t have a surface, and so you can’t really characterize them. I started thinking, you know, it’d be really cool if there was a way that I could characterize planets. And around that time, I read about Dr. Rosaly Lopes, who’s a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and she talked about her studies of Jupiter’s moon Io and how it’s the most volcanically-active body in the solar system, how it has a molten surface. And I thought that that was really cool, and so I sent her an email, in typical HBCU-trained form. She was never going to be Rosaly, she was always going to be Dr. Lopes. So I told her who I was and where I was in graduate school and that I found her work really interesting, but I wasn’t in the LA area. Was there anyone in the DC-Maryland area who did similar work? And she gave me two names, Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, who you may know is now the PI of the Dragonfly mission to Titan. And Dr. Louise Prockter, who’s now PI of a mission called Trident to go to Neptune’s moon Triton. That mission is in competition with another few missions. And so I emailed both of them, and Louise Prockter got back to me first. And I told her I thought, you know, I had talked to Dr. Lopes and I thought that the research she did was really cool, and Dr. Lopes gave me her name, and I said, you know, I’m a physics major at Catholic University. I don’t know any planetary geology. But I’d love to learn, and I just wanted to know if you thought you might need a summer intern. And she asked me for my resume, and after she got my resume, she said, “Well, why don’t you come out to APL? Why don’t you meet me and my postdoc?” And so I went and I met them, and this whole time I’m thinking, you know, I had been trained to do-- As a physics major, we do math and we love math. And when you look at planetary geology, it’s not necessarily as “mathy” as physics. And so I remember talking to Dr. Beth Brown, who was an astrophysicist at -- you may have heard of her. She was an astrophysicist at Goddard at that time.

Zierler:
Yep, yeah.

Quick:
And she also became a mentor. We had so many similarities that it was just, you know, it was wonderful to have her as a mentor. And I told her, I said, “You know, I’m thinking about planetary geology and planetary science. It’s not ‘mathy’ but I think I really have an interest in it. What would you think if I change from astrophysics to planetary? Is that too much of a shift, because it’s not ‘mathy?’ And we’ve both been trained to be ‘mathy.’” And she really encouraged me to just go with your heart, if that’s what you’re interested in, then do it. So with her encouragement, I went to APL. I met with Dr. Louise Prockter and with her postdoc, Dr. Wes Patterson, and so I talked with them for about 15 minutes, and she’s still looking at my resume, and she said, “Well, are you still interested in an internship? Because if you are, I’m going to hire you.” And I was like, “Are you kidding?” Well of course, I didn’t say that. That’s what I was thinking. And I was like, “Yes, I’m definitely interested.” So she hired me and I spent that summer looking at regions on Europa’s surface. Of course, Europa is this icy moon, as you know. And I had never seen anything like it. It was just this ice-covered moon and I learned about chaos regions, which are these areas of the surface that are broken up like large icebergs and it’s believed that these icebergs, they broke apart from the rest of the ice shell. They flicked over and kind of floated in the subsurface ocean, and it was just... I loved it and I found connections with math, because since it’s an ocean moon, we’re thinking about fluid mechanics there. And so after that summer, I pretty much realized, hey, you know, astrophysics is pretty cool, but I think planetary science is cooler.

Mickens:
When I was about seven or eight years old, my parents bought me a chemistry set. Gilbert. You may have heard the name? Gilbert chemistry set. Look it up. I mean those things were real. I tell students nowadays, “You know, look, these modern-day chemistry sets you get for Christmas, they’re bogus. You need a chemistry set where you can kill yourself. You need to have stuff in there that will blow up, that will set things on fire.” I doubt nowadays that you could even buy a modern chemistry set with an alcohol burner. Also, the chemistry set included glass tubes and taught you how to blow glass, bend it, and make various things. I remember one time I was mixing stuff, and you know when you’re young, what you do, you mix stuff. You say, “Let’s see what happens.” And I put it over the burner, and it blew up. Fortunately, I was not standing over it, but it blew a hole in- I was in the kitchen, in the floor and in the ceiling. See, that’s what makes real science. When you go from experiences like that, that will allow you to become a scientist, you need to experience the thrill of almost dying, but not dying.

Zierler:
Ron, did you know that you wanted to be a scientist? I mean it’s one thing to want to do experiments and have fun as a kid, but at what point did you look in the mirror and say, “I want to do this for a career?”

Mickens:
I was curious. I never said I wanted to be a scientist. What I wanted to do was to be engaged in certain activities. I wanted to learn and understand mathematics. I wanted- it was a whole variety of things and they just happened- those attributes just happened to be the ones that we attribute to science, but there was no point. But you know after I came about ten years old, you find out well the people who do those things you do call scientists, you know, and to become a scientist, generally you need to have these kinds of skills and background and courses to take and so forth. For example, now, most people when they look at my research, they want to characterize me as, “Oh, you’re a physicist. Oh, you’re a mathematician.” I mean, I go to three or four different kinds of conferences and different people have no knowledge of what I do in other areas, you know. But I think the best thing to call me is – I’m curious. And so, I could do many things. Now, whether I can do it well or not is totally irrelevant to me. That’s decided by other people. And other people’s opinions I’ve generally tried not to have them influence me very much.

Zierler:
One of the lessons, I think, to take away from #shutdownSTEMwas that it wasn’t just a day on the calendar — that the point is, is that this really needs to be an ongoing conversation, because the problems are not going to go away just by taking a day off for reflection. It should really be a day off for reflection and then using that, the momentum of that day, to really push the field in the most positive and productive way possible. So first, I want to ask you: over the course of your career — and these are obviously very difficult things to quantify — but do you think from even your days as an undergraduate in New York, has the world of science become better or not for people of color?

Delfyett:
I think it has become better for people of color, and —let’s see. It has certainly become better for people of color, because as time goes on, there are more people of color that are getting into positions in academia and industry and are being recognized and can serve as mentors for other folks from underrepresented groups come through. That evolution is occurring at different rates in different disciplines. So, for example, I think the number of minorities in the areas of engineering has increased more rapidly than the number of minorities in the areas of physics, as an example. So yes, there are more Ph.D. physicists who are Black, and women, as an example, today than there were 30 years ago. But that’s going slower — the numbers are increasing slower than what you would see in a computer science department, chemistry, biology, engineering, et cetera. Minorities are folks in underrepresented groups, and those areas of STEM are increasing at a more rapid rate.

Zierler:
What do you think explains that?

Delfyett:
Very simple. Physicists were trained very much with the kind of style where —older physicists, for sure — with, [deepens voice] “I had to struggle. You must struggle, too.” [laughs] Right? There’s not a lot of warm hugs and embracing, and physics is not like that.Right? It is not like that. And so, when you’re from a community of folks which is typically underrepresented, and you may feel less secure about what your capabilities are, being thrust into an environment which is less warm, colder, an environment which is, “I had to struggle. You must struggle too,” is daunting.It’s a little daunting. Now, for sure,I’mnot saying engineering is not like that, but I think just because there have been — because of that, I think that has been a barrier for folks to go into physics. Also, here’s another thing. Physics is an excellent undergraduate degree for going to graduate school. You know, physics for sure isa very broad undergraduate training in math and physics. You get some quantum, statistical mechanics, you know, classical mechanics, et cetera, whereas in an engineering discipline, folks come out with an engineering degree and actually can be hired as an engineer. Folks typically, as an undergraduate degree in physics, are not necessarily going to be hired to do physics, which is why I basically say: physics is a great degree for graduate school. So, many times, people will get a physics undergraduate degree, and if they’re not going to graduate school in physics, and they are going to graduate school, it’s going to be in a discipline other than physics — patent law, or whatever it is, MBA, et cetera.

So what we tend to do is we tend to lose students that way as well.

Zierler:
But just to be clear, the issues that you’re describing are essentially colorblind, in the sense that, you know, what a physics undergraduate degree can do, that’s true whether you’re Black, white, Asian, whatever.

Delfyett:
That’s correct. But my point ultimately is to say the things like that, I think, then — you know, smart undergraduates, if you’re people of color or not, I’m going to say: well, gee, would I do an undergraduate degree in physics or EE, I might choose EE because I think I might be able to get a job better. So, in terms of trying to attract — again,that’s an issue independent of color, but again, issues of color — again, if you’re coming from maybe an educational background where things may not be as easy. Maybe you’re coming from a two-year college. You know, your math skills may not be as great.Whatever it is. I don’t know. If you’re feeling a little insecure, and then going into an environment where the general environment is: I had to struggle; you have to struggle, too. That little bit of insecurity just is an extra amount of weight. And that’s how I think the students may receive that, even though the faculty — you know, that just may be their demeanor. They just may be — pardon the expression — grumpy old men, because that’s how they were trained to be.

Zierler:
Where do you see that improvisation in physics that has led to fundamental discovery? I mean, somebody like a Ray Weiss, for example, who was toiling essentially all by himself for so many years. And then, look what he created. Is that what improvisation is to you? Is that the kind of idea, the kind of achievement that comes to mind when you think about the value of improvisation in physics?

Alexander:
Yeah, I mean, one of the essential elements of improvisation is embracing mistakes, and actually, the extent to which you are fearful or you’re afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or playing that wrong note is a function of the consequences of that mistake. Are you going to be the laughingstock? Are you going to be kicked out of the club? If these are the consequences of making a mistake, I say, that’s not – the essence of improvisation is go there. Miles Davis, play that wrong note. It’s a question of what do you do about it? What do you see once you – you only know once you do that wrong thing, because now you’re in a situation where you can look around and see, okay, this is where I’m at. What do I do about this? How do I correct this? Sometimes that can lead to new directions that you otherwise wouldn’t know about had you not been exactly in that situation.

Improvisation is a way of navigating through mistakes and learning how to fall properly, like an elegant acrobat. You trip up, how do you fall once that mistake is made? Some great ideas in physics, some great experiments, not all, come from actually going in what you thought to be a wrong direction, taking stock of where you’re at in real time, and then being informed by that to go into a new territory that leads to a breakthrough. Paul Dirac had to improvise when he found out that the probability was negative, and they had negative energy. What do you do? Do you throw away the theory? Is it wrong? No, he came up with the antiparticle. Maxwell... when he had to complete his equations he realized that the displacement current had to be invented. That’s an improvisation because you could at that point put your hands up and say, that was a mistake. That’s wrong. You know, the theory is sick. It’s not unitary. It’s divergent. All these criticisms. There’s a moment for improvisation. What do you do when you fall? What do you do when you trip up? What do you do when you’re wrong and make a mistake? That’s kind of the essence of good improvisation.

Mason:
I had not done that before, so it was my first time and it was a challenge. The thing is, I did defer, like I said, I deferred for a year because I could. And so I had extra time to set up the lab and to think about it, which was very nice. So it ended up being okay. Of course now, I would have set it up totally differently, but it worked okay.

Zierler:
So what worked and what would you do differently if you had a second chance for this?

Mason:
Well, there’s a couple things. One is that I do low temperature physics and we have these big what we call dilution refrigerators that mix helium 3 and helium 4 to get things to very low temperatures, and they need—

Zierler:
So you’ve come back to helium 3 actually.

Mason:
Helium 3, but these are commercial instruments. So exactly. At this point, they’re just commercial, you buy them, but you have to fill them with helium 4 at least to keep them cold, and helium 4 is expensive. If you run these things full-time, it’s 100,000, 150,000 a year to run them full-time with helium costs.

When I started, there were new technologies called dry dilution refrigerates, which recirculated the helium 4, but they cost twice as much and they were a new technology, so I opted not to invest in those. And about four years later, that’s all anybody bought. And so I definitely regret not waiting or investing in the newer technology ‘cause it’s taken me another maybe 15 years to get to the point where I have enough of the newer dry systems that I can retire the wet systems. The other thing I did is I kind of compartmentalized the lab into different linear sections. I think now labs are really much more open—it’s like the open office concept has come to the laboratory. I think I would have done it in a much more open office concept with desks on one side and the opened spaces on the other, then everyone intermingled rather than private cubicles of lab . . .

Zierler:
I’m curious how the experience of putting together a lab from scratch might have influenced the kinds of research questions that you were asking that sort of chicken and the egg relationship between your academic interests and the instrumentation and experimentation that’s available to you to carry out those questions?

Mason:
These come hand in hand. I started out with three or four projects I knew I wanted to work on and I knew what equipment I could get to work on these problems. And so in that case, I recognize equipment as an essential part of the project. So you put together a list of what you want to buy, and you make sure that everything that you buy or what they have is part of what you can use to measure.

One of the key things is—because I do a lot of fabrication and materials characterization—it was important to me to go to a place that had strong materials characterization and fabrication facilities. And Illinois has really great facilities in all of these areas, in a space that’s just adjacent to my lab, in fact. Or in the same building. It was important that they also agreed to purchase, for the labs, a big electron beam writer to make better nanofab facilities devices.

I had to work with them to make sure that I could get the equipment needed for my projects. So I don’t really see it as a chicken and the egg, but rather as one chicken.