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And in contrast to pop-culture portrayals of theoretical physicists – alone writing one thing on a blackboard, shrouded in clouds of chalk mud – Dr. Massey loves working with individuals. In return, individuals respect him a lot that his identify is spoken in the precise rooms. He completes one undertaking, and it doesn't take lengthy earlier than one other one falls into his lap. In addition they are likely to inherit organizations in want of some course – most not too long ago large Magellan, which is going through monetary turmoil.
Dr. Massey's involvement within the telescope undertaking got here on the finish of his presidency on the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. Throughout a board assembly for the Woods Gap Marine Organic Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmern, then president of the College of Chicago, approached him about serving on the board of Large Magellan. A 12 months later, Dr. Massey was elected president.
However of all his posts and accolades, one stands out, Dr. Massey stated. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse Faculty, a traditionally black males's school in Atlanta and the location of Dr. King's funeral. “With out Morehouse,” he stated, “I wouldn’t be who I’m.”
torn between worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., through the top of segregation. If you happen to had been black, he recalled, you’ll sit within the balcony on the motion pictures, journey within the again on buses and slip in by the facet entrances of shops – for those who may store there. And when a white particular person was on the sidewalk, you moved out of the way in which.
Determined to go, he was ecstatic when, at age 16, he gained a scholarship to attend Morehouse. However he quickly realized that his classmates seemed down on individuals from Mississippi. “And so I stated, 'I'll present them,'” Dr. Massey stated. “Which is the toughest path?” He selected physics as a result of he felt he had one thing to show.
Within the consortium of 4 schools, he was the one pupil finding out Physics in his 12 months. However he was by no means alone. Quite the opposite, he appreciated to get misplaced in equations. Years later, in his memoirs, Dr. Massey described a “full absorption” that was as near a meditative state as I ever achieved.
He channeled that zeal right into a doctoral program at Washington College in St. Louis, the place he studied how liquid helium behaves close to absolute zero levels. In 1966, he acquired his Ph.D. and joined the group of greater than a dozen black physicists throughout the nation who had achieved the identical feat.
Quickly after, Dr. Massey moved to Chicago to work on the close by Argonne Nationwide Laboratory to check the unusual conduct of sound waves in superfluid helium, which appeared to defy the legal guidelines of physics. His work attracted the eye of researchers at Urbana-Champaign, in addition to Anthony Leggett, a theorist on the College of Sussex in England, whose understanding of helium later earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics.