99 Percent Failure Rate, 60-Year Waits, Yet This Man Loves His Career

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99 Percent Failure Rate, 60-Year Waits, Yet This Man Loves His Career
Meet Sylvester James "Jim" Gates, Ph.D
Yahoo Contributor Network
By Carol Bengle Gilbert  5 hours ago



Dr. Jim Gates explaining a concept in theoretical physics.



Theoretical physicist Sylvester James "Jim" Gates, Ph.D., inhabits a magic world of leptons, gravity, quarks, and heterotic strings. He recently shared that magic with middle school students through the USA Science & Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty speaker series. Gates is the John S. Toll professor of physics at the University of Maryland and serves on both the Maryland State Board of Education and the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology.

What does a theoretical physicist do?

This is a question I often get. The first answer I give to people is the answer my wife gives. She says, "He makes up stuff for a living." That's almost but not quite correct. The thing that I like to tell people is everyone knows what a novelist does: a novelist takes punctuation and letters and words and tells a story. A theoretical physicist does the same thing, except our language for communicating our story is actually mathematics and experiments. For a theorist, it's only mathematics. So I'm a person who makes up stories using mathematics about things that, if we're doing our jobs right, will one day be important for understanding the structure of the universe.

What drew you into this field?

I'm one of those people who always, more or less, wanted to be a scientist. For me it started at age four years old. I was living in St. John's, Newfoundland, at the time and one day my mother took her then three children to see a movie. This is the first movie I ever remember seeing. It was about space ships and space travel. This was 1954, so no one had actually ever been out into outer space. But everyone knew that it was going to happen soon, so there were lots of movies like this. I sat there at four years old and saw this movie, and something about it caught my attention. To this day, I can't quite understand what it was. But the family lore goes, and this part I don't remember, that evening supposedly I tried to explain the movie to my father. That's the first time that science came into my consciousness.

There's a subsequent event- four years later, we were living in El Paso, Texas, and Dad brought home four books on space travel. These books were by an author named Willie Ley who wrote a series for young children. At this point, something happened inside my head; I realized that the points of light in the night sky were not just things you could see but places to where one might travel. Somehow, subconsciously, I must have remembered this movie because I knew that the way you got to travel to such places was by doing science. That's the first time I thought about being a scientist. Of course, it was simultaneous with the desire to become an astronaut.

Of course, everybody in that generation wanted to be an astronaut.

I almost became one. Much later in my life. In 1979, when I was finishing up my first post-doc at Harvard, and I had yet to begin my second post-doc, a friend of mine called, someone who I had gone to graduate school with. We had been friends. We'd studied together. His name was Ronald McNair. He was the African American astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion. Ron was a physicist, by the way. Most people don't know that Ron was a Ph.D., a laser physicist. That's what he was doing even while he was in the astronaut corps. He called in '79 and said, "Jim, they're going to open up a new round of applications for the astronaut corps, and I think you should apply."

Ron and I had had many, many talks over the years, so he knew that I was fascinated from my childhood with the idea. So I actually did apply to become an astronaut. I was told that approximately 3,000 people applied during that round of applications. They whittled them down, successively, to a group of about 120. Then, in groups of 12, these 120 people were invited to come to the Johnson Space Flight Center for psychological and physical evaluations and I was among one of those dozens of people. But, in the end, NASA told me I had the wrong stuff. They did not extend the invitation for me to join the corps.

When they told me it was "no," I was laughing on the phone, and I'm sure that they thought, "Oh my God, this man has become hysterical." But what they didn't know was in between the time I had applied to the program to become an astronaut, I had gotten an acceptance to become a post-doc at Cal Tech, so if they had said yes, I would have been faced with the most difficult decision of my life, whether I should pursue my dream of becoming an astronaut or whether I should pursue my dream of becoming a scientist. And the fact that they removed that issue was something that just made me ecstatically happy.

Were there any scientists whose work particularly influenced you?

I was born in the 1950s. People forget that the 50's and early 60's was a time when our society was super-saturated with the idea of scientists. There were all kinds of programs for children, and all kinds of allusions to sciences in the popular media, and so I like to say the society was set up to generate scientists in large numbers at those times. That's something that's very different from today. I, like a lot of kids, watched a lot of TV, and there were scientists coming through. There was space travel, and programs like" Rocky Jones, Space Ranger" and those sorts of things. It all kind of impelled one to keep thinking about the idea.

The first person in my life who I met who becomes closest to being a scientist was my physics teacher. He was a gentleman in Orlando, Florida. His name was Mr. Freeman Coney. Mr. Coney had a bachelor's degree in physics which was very unusual. To this day, in fact, it's unusual for a high school teacher to have a bachelor's in the discipline they're teaching. But Mr. Coney did, and he was a wonderful teacher. He was the first real scientific-like person in my life.

But the drive for education actually comes from the family. My father didn't have the opportunity to go to college but he was dedicated completely to the idea that his children would have a chance to go to college. I went to college and didn't stop until I got two Bachelors and a Ph.D.

I read in an online interview with you that Einstein is someone you admire.

Yes. I've actually been misunderstood. I have said I first met Einstein when I was 16. And the journalist who heard the quote thought I meant literally I met Einstein when I was 16. If the journalist had done a little bit of homework, he would have been able to figure out that's impossible because Einstein died 10 years before I was 16. I meant it in a figurative sense. That teacher that I named earlier, Mr. Coney, taught physics. He was fantastic. When I was in eleventh grade, we learned all the way up to relativity and quantum physics at some introductory level. And, so, I first met Mr. Einstein's ideas as a 16 year old high school student. The ideas were just stunning, as a kind of understatement. When you delve into these kind of ideas, they make you question, did this actually come from a person, or did it come from some other source, because the things that he did were just so incredible. I immediately recognized this was an order of intellect I had no idea existed on the planet.

I've also noticed that in some discussions, you use words like of magic and imagination in describing your work in theoretical physics, and I'm curious as to why?

Earlier I made the explanation that a theoretical physicist is like a novelist in the sense that we both make stories. In order to make stories, you have to have imagination. And so, if you're a theoretical physicist pushing the boundaries, trying to develop new results, you must rely on your imagination. Otherwise, you will not get any place. After working in the field for about 10 years, I finally realized that that's what Einstein likely meant when he said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

How do you know if your imagination is leading you somewhere real or not?

That's actually a good question. Something I tell people is that you need to understand that most of the times we theoretical physicists are busy making up our mathematical ideas, 99 percent of them are wrong. You can easily be lead astray. The only thing that keeps our discipline from operating like a faith-based system is the fact that when we make up our stories, the audience that must be satisfied is not a group of people, it's what I like to call the audience of nature. You see, a good theoretical physicist, sure they can make up their mathematical stories, but when we say "good," that means these stories are an accurate description of something observed in nature.

You said 99 percent of your ideas are wrong. What have been some of your really wrong or really right ideas?

This is a very good question, one that I cannot answer. You see, the kind of physics I do typically doesn't get settled inside of a century. And this is, again, something that's not generally understood. A lot of people think, gee, you can tell whether it's right or wrong in a year, two years, ten years… That's not actually the case with theoretical physics. I'll give you an example: in 1930, Einstein wrote what many regard as his last great paper. And this paper's not so widely known in the public. It's a paper he wrote with an Indian physicist by the name of Bose. In this paper, the two of them predict a state of matter that no one had ever dreamed could exist. This state of matter is called the Bose-Einstein condensate in honor of these two gentlemen. This is a state of matter that the equations say can exist, and it wasn't until the 1990s that this was actually observed. It's like 60 years. So in the kind of physics that I do, it won't be settled, I would be surprised if we would know with definite statement, inside of a century or so.

Is that frustrating- to devote your life to something and not know whether it pans out?

To me, no, because I think in order to do this kind of physics, it takes a particular kind of psychology. You have to , you hope that nature's kind and that you'll get some indication that you have not wasted your entire productive life, but there are no guarantees on that, none at all. If you decide to do this, that's something you have to make your peace with at the very beginning. Or, maybe get out when you come to realize this.

I understand you used to make up comic book characters when you were younger. Did this have any bearing on your career choice?

My mother died when I was 11, and part of the way that I escaped that harsh reality was by creating a world of fantasy. Part of that world of fantasy included comic book characters which I created and made little homemade comic books. This was an escape mechanism. It worked for me at the time. It certainly allowed me to navigate a very difficult period in my life. It also had the curious effect of meaning that I was actively using my imagination long after most of my fellow teenage friends had sort of stopped doing that. I have always had this active use of my imagination, and when I became a physicist what I discovered was that that component of my personality is a very great strength because it allows me to do things that no one else can think about.

Were any of these comic book characters physics-oriented?

The ones I remember most fondly- there are a few- were modeled a little bit after the Fantastic Four, a superhero group. I don't know how much you may have delved into that domain, but the Fantastic Four is actually led by a scientist.

Did you bring real science into it?

No, nothing so advanced. It was just fun escapism.

All along, you do make physics sound like a lot of fun and games and a lot of creativity, and I'm wondering is there a way you know of to make the resources for teachers communicate that playful aspect of physics to kids? I know my kids come home and say physics is hard, it's boring…

Unfortunately, for most young people, that will be their initial encounter with physics. The unfortunate truth is that science and math as taught to most young Americans is done very poorly. We see all kinds of evidence when we, for example, look at the scores that young Americans can achieve on some international standardized tests, compared to other countries. We just do an awful job as a country, typically, teaching science and mathematics to our young. So I'm not surprised that your children tell you it's terrible.

It is often the case in the United States that we have teachers of science and mathematics who were not trained to do it and therefore the teachers are not very comfortable doing that. And that gets communicated to the young people. They can sense it. In fact, part of the reason it looks so rigid to them is because teachers only know how to do it one way, whereas people like me that sort of live and breathe a science, we can fly through the material because we know many, many, many paths to get to the right answers.

I saw an example of this in a school fairly recently. There was a problem that was given to a class. I was in the room, and I sort of watched, and the teacher gave a problem out, and you know some kids got it, some kids didn't, but there was this one kid who got the right answer - he got it in an extremely unusual way, but it was logically correct. But because it was not the way the teacher had been taught to teach the problem, she didn't understand what he had done, and she forced him to think about the problem like everybody else. And that's the kind of rigidity we often see all throughout the school systems in the United States. We just don't have teachers who know how to fly through the material in the main.

And that's the kind of kid that likely has the kind of imagination to make really important contributions, and so it was very saddening to actually be in the room witnessing this. I was just amazed.

Teachers don't need Ph.D's to [teach science and mathematics.] What they do need is to understand more science than the typical science teacher gets in their training. As we train teachers in the United States to do mathematics and science, most of these young people who become teachers never actually take a real science course or a real mathematics course. That's how our system works. So this has nothing to do with getting a Ph.D., just getting a real introduction to science.

While we're talking about teachers, let me make another comment. Teachers get beat up really badly in our society today. But it's not really their fault. As I just noted, we don't provide adequate training for teachers. My stepmother and my sister were both teachers. My stepmother taught for 33 years. My sister retired last year after 30 years of teaching art. I'm not disposed to beat up on teachers, but I know what I have seen in the classroom, and it is this abysmal thing that I described.

I understand you did your master's at MIT on supersymmetry; how do you explain supersymmetry to people?

If you go into almost any science class, anywhere in the world, you will likely find an image of the Periodic Table of Elements. Most people have seen it. What most people haven't seen is what it looked like when the scientist Mendeleev first proposed the existence of this thing. It turns out it's got a whole bunch of gaps in it. It looks very little like the Table of Elements today. And the thing that's really striking about this original picture compared to today's picture is today's picture is really, really symmetric. Just by looking at this original picture, you would say gee, there's something missing there. It's just so obvious when you look at this object. And these things that are missing are elements that no one had discovered at the time.

Now let's fast forward to our time. We know about things like electrons, and protons and quarks. We know about particles of light. So you can make a modern table just like the old Mendeleev table, but instead of talking about table of elements you talk about table of fundamental particles. And when you make this modern table, and if you look at it a certain way, it has the same kind of asymmetry that the original Table of Elements did. And so supersymmetry is a mathematical suggestion that we ought to think about more forms of matter and energy to get the same kind of balance that we see in the Table of Elements.

That's such a clear explanation...

That's also an example of what I mean by flying through material. A teacher who has real depth in what they're doing, they find ways to connect.

I think that's important because people learn so differently…

Exactly. There are so many different styles of learning.

Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to mention?

Just one. Oftentimes people ask me how did I get to become a scientist. I say, "Oh, that was simple. I just picked the right dad."

My father was an incredible person. In my 30s or 40s, I finally realized how unusual my father was. My grandparents on my father's side had a divorce when he was quite young. He spent the early part of his childhood with his mother in a small town near Prichard, Alabama, and then when he was 12, he went to live with his father on my grandfather's farm. My grandfather owned some land. He was a sugarcane farmer. Typical sort of what you would expect in the early 1900s in the southern part of the United States with the terrorism that went along with race in full effect. But my grandfather had one rather unusual attribute, at least according to family lore. He could neither read nor write but he could do arithmetic. And so in some sense we have a family affinity for mathematics that as I understand my family story first shows up there. I remember as a child watching my father, who had not ever finished high school, study trigonometry and I think some calculus. I have a daughter who is a double major in math and physics just as I double majored in math and physics at MIT. And I have nieces and nephews who I am told are very good in mathematics. So we have some sort of familial affinity for mathematics apparently. There's this suggestive evidence.

I would say what I think is most important for people to understand is that the human experience is so vast that one should be open to all kinds of potentialities developing in young people and be on the lookout not to shut those off in anyone's young children. Remember my story in science started when I was four years old. And that's because my father - well first of all my mother by accident- but my father recognized there was something he'd seen in his own life and his father's life that apparently was continuing in mine. And that's very important.

What was the accident that contributed to your becoming a scientist?

Ah… this movie I told you about that my mother took us to see was named Space Ways. The reason I know that was the movie is because I actually have memories from a few of the scenes that I carry to this day. About seven years ago, I began using these mental images to try to track down the film. About three years ago, I finally found it.

The reason my mother took us to see this movie had always been a mystery to me because my mother had zero interest in science and technology. So I had this memory and I had recollections of my mother- it was a disconnect. Why in the world did she take her three kids, bundled them up, because it was snowy and cold - this is St. John's, Newfoundland, north of Nova Scotia- why did she take us to go see this movie? This had been a deep puzzle to me for a very long time. When I found the movie, I think I also found the answer. It turns out that this movie stars an actor by the name of Howard Duff. Howard Duff at one point was married to an actress by the name of Ida Lupino. Ida Lupino was my mother's favorite actress. That's what got me into that theater. Who knew that because my mother had this favorite actress it would result in her son wandering off into the wilds of physics?


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