A Quantum Life
They called him “The Professor” because by the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test. But, by the time he was in his teens, the certified genius was smoking, dealing weed, and carrying a gun for protection. “If anyone had told me I’d grow up to an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn’t have believed them,” writes Hakeem Oluseyi, an African- American astrophysicist, in his inspiring memoir “A Quantum Life,” which chronicles his improbable journey, from the street to the stars.
In his 1970s boyhood, Oluseyi was James Plummer Jr., the son of divorced parents. Frequently uprooted, he learned to survived in some of America’s toughest urban neighborhoods. He lived in rural Mississippi, a poor, southern state, where older people addressed white people, including children, as “yes ma’am, yes sir.” The state had some of the worst-performing public schools in the entire nation, which meant he was mostly self-taught. Even when he was young, he realized you could be smart and ignorant at the same time as people in his family were. They did not lack in intelligence, but were ignorant because they hardly read books except for the Bible. Oluseyi loved books. “Albert Einstein and I would have been friends,” the loner recalls thinking, when he read about the scientist in an encyclopedia. Einstein too was a book smart boy, who was told to “stop staring into space.”
In Mississippi, the schoolboy learned complex scientific concepts on his own. A music teacher made him a tuba player just to keep him out of trouble. As a high schooler, Oluseyi taught himself programming and coded concepts of Einstein’s relativity theory into a game and won first place in physics in the Mississippi State Science Fair.
To fund his college education, he joined the navy, where he could train to be a nuclear engineer, but after two years, he was diagnosed with atopic dermatitis, which barred him from serving on ships. An old friend encouraged him to enroll in Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The two of them sold drugs on campus and dropped out, but Oluseyi reenrolled.
This time, David Teal, a white, Harvard-educated professor in the historically black college, took personal interest in the gifted student. He urged Oluseyi to attend a meeting of African American physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The experience felt unreal, Oluseyi writes, like an “alien abduction,” but it gave him a clear goal — apply to graduate programs.
“Every year,” he writes, “the Stanford physics department took in one student like me – a diversity admission who wasn’t at the same level of academic preparation as the rest of the class.” It would take a lot more than hard work to earn this PhD, but he was up for the challenge (and changed his name to mark his transforming life).
Besides, his doctoral advisor was Arthur Walker. The accomplished astrophysicist, whose innovative telescopes allowed scientists unprecedented views of the sun, had mentored minority students of all stripes. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was his first doctoral student. “In the world of physics,” Walker once told Oluseyi, “some still believed that while Black scientists might be able to build ingenious gadgets, they weren’t intellectually or mathematically gifted enough to make insights into the workings of nature – either in pure physics or in the analyses of data and observations.”
While Walker got credit for developing novel technology to study the sun, doubters said he had few pure science publications to his name. Before Walker died of cancer in 2001, Oluseyi worked with his ailing mentor to seal his scientific legacy. Today, Oluseyi is one of few black astrophysicists worldwide, but he has been working to change that.
This vivid memoir, the stuff of a Hollywood biopic, is filled with dramatic moments. Yes, it is the story of one exceptional African American scientist, but the account can also offer hope to anyone with ambition and ability, to rise above their difficult circumstances.
A version of this review appears in the New Scientist.