And unlike pop-culture depictions of theoretical physicists scribbling in solitude on blackboards, covered in chalk dust, Dr. Massey likes to collaborate with people. As a result, people value him enough to mention his name in appropriate places. As soon as he completes one project, another one falls into his lap. He also has a penchant for taking over organizations that need some direction, most recently taking over Giant Magellan, which is facing financial turmoil.
Dr. Massey became involved with the telescope project toward the end of his tenure as president of the Art Institute of Chicago. During a board meeting of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Institute in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then president of the University of Chicago, approached him about serving on the board of Giant Magellan. A year later, Dr. Massey was elected chair.
But among all his posts and accolades, one stands out, Dr. Massey said. In 1995, he became president of Morehouse College, his alma mater. Morehouse College is a historically black men’s college in Atlanta and the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. “If it wasn’t for Morehouse, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he said.
torn between worlds
Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Michigan, during the height of racial segregation. If you were black, he recalled, you would sit on the balcony of a movie theater, ride a bus from the back, or slip through a side door at a store. And when white people were on the sidewalk, you moved out of the way.
Eager to leave college, he was overjoyed when he won a scholarship to attend Morehouse at age 16. However, he soon realized that his classmates looked down on people from Mississippi. “So I said, ‘I’ll show you,'” Dr. Massey said. “What is the most difficult course?” He chose physics because he felt he had something to prove.
In the entire consortium of four universities, he was the only student studying physics that year. But he was never alone. On the contrary, he loved getting lost in equations.A few years later, in him biographyDr. Massey described it as “the closest complete absorption to a meditative state I’ve ever achieved.”
His passion led him to a doctoral program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied how liquid helium behaves near absolute zero. In 1966 he received his Ph.D., joining the ranks of more than a dozen black physicists across the country who had accomplished the same feat.
Soon after, Dr. Massey moved to Chicago and worked at nearby Argonne National Laboratory, studying the strange behavior of sound waves in superfluid helium, which seemed to defy the laws of physics. His work attracted the attention of researchers at the University of Urbana-Champaign as well as Anthony Leggett, a theorist at the University of Sussex in England who understands helium. He would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
