Crystallography Pioneer Mentored Other History Makers

Physicist Donald Anderson Edwards not only made significant contributions to his field, he mentored others who did likewise:

• Joseph McNeill – a engineering physics major was one of the Greensboro Four . It should be noted that Franklin McCain, another member of the Greensboro Four, was also a STEM major(dual degrees in chemisty and biology).
• Dwight Davis – is a distinguished cardiologist “who has played a leading role in medical education at Pennsylvania State University for almost 25 years.”
• Ronald McNair became the second African-American astronaut to fly on the Space Shuttle. His plan to be the first human to record an original piece of music in space was cut short by the Challenger explosion.

Don’t Be Like D-Jay

… practical, everyday reasons to love STEM …

When you don’t love STEM, you can’t make or distribute your own products.
When you can’t make or distribute your own products you have less control.
When you have less control you make less money.
When you make less money, you get desparate.
When you get desparate, you resort to pimping.
When you start pimping, you end up like D-Jay.
Don’t end up like D-Jay.

Embrace STEM. End up like

James Edward Maceo West

Along withGerhard Sessler, West developed the foil electret microphone in 1962. Nearly 90 percent of the more than two billion microphones produced annually are based on the principles of the foil-electret and are used in everyday items such as telephones, camcorders, and audio recording devices among others.

Quadruple Play: Physics, Biology, Math and Music

Physicist and 2013 Edward Bouchet Award winner Stephon Alexander can be seen below with Jim Gates, who as we’ve previously noted was the first(1994) recipient of that award.

In the background of the photo above you can see that the two physicists are at the E.E. Just Symposium. Stephon Alexander is the Ernest Everett Just 1907 Professor of Natural Sciences at Dartmouth. Just was a visionary biologist who saw

that organisms are holistic systems with emergent properties that arise from their organization and complexity …

Only today, with powerful tools such as low-light, high-contrast optical-sectioning microscopy (Yuste and Konnerth, 2005), are we beginning to noninvasively image molecular activities and other events inside cells as they occur during development.

E. E. Just understood, long before such technologies were available, that treating the cell as a holistic system necessitates using methods that do not destroy its integrity. Today, as ecology and biological development, separated for a hundred years, are reunited under the auspices of Eco-Devo, we can celebrate the work and insight of Ernest Everett Just.

Science Direct

Stephon Alexander is also exploring relationships between disciplines:

“There is a conceptual connection between physics and music,” Alexander observes. “In composition or improvisation I see geometric parallels to physical laws like gravity, with the musician gravitating to or away from certain tonal tensions. I see geometry as a principle that governs physical law and also harmonic and rhythmic ideas in music, especially in jazz.”

Dartmouth Now(emphasis mine)

In this Ted Talk he even demonstrates how John Coltrane’s Giant Steps can be related geometrically to quantum gravity and dna! As he notes in his presentation it might be  “a bit much”, however recalling the notion that Drummers Are Natural Intellectuals, perhaps it’s quite Natural.

The Power of the Village

In her MIT MLK Legacy speech by Physics and Nuclear Science & Engineering major Margo Batie

illustrates what the village can accomplish. In the last post it was mentioned STEM is hard, that you have to be prepared and that it takes a village. This young lady shows what it takes to prepare and excel in a demanding, competitive environment. Her success is rooted in an exceptionally strong STEM village(the subject of a future post). However they get it, young people need a strong village to excel in STEM.

STEAM

Luz Martinez-Miranda, the 2014 Edward Bouchet Award winner has a joint undergraduate degree in Phyics and Music. She says it’s all about balance. STEAM is what results when the Arts take their rightful place within STEM. STEAM will be a recurring theme here.

Currently Luz

studies liquid crystals, substances that flow like liquids but have order to their molecules in one direction, as crystals do. Liquid crystals are used in electronic displays; for example, the dark material that forms numbers on calculators is a liquid crystal. Liquid crystals also form part of the cell membranes in biological cells.

Physics Central: Learn How Your World Works

The 16 Branches of Physics

Physics is a very general term that doesn’t provide any insight into how and where physics is applicable to other fields and practical in daily life. Consequently it can be helpful for both lay and professional folk to have it broken down into sub-fields. The National Society of Black Physicists site is nicely organized into 16 sections:

1. Acoustics (ACOU)
2. Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASTRO)
3. Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (AMO)
4. Chemical and Biological Physics (CBP)
5. Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP)
6. Cosmology, Gravitation, and Relativity (CGR)
7. Earth and Planetary Systems Sciences (EPSS)
8. Fluid and Plasma Physics (FPP)
9. Health Physics (HEA)
10. History, Policy and Education (HPE)
11. Mathematical and Computational Physics (MCP)
12. Medical Physics (MED)
13. Nuclear and Particle Physics (NPP)
14. Photonics and Optics (POP)
15. Physics Education Research (PER)
16. Technology Transfer, Business Development and Entrepreneurism (TBE)

The First Black Ph.D Was In Physics

Edward Bouchet was one of the first dozen or so Americans of any ethnicity to receive a PhD in Physics and just the 6th person to do so at Yale, In addition, he was the first African-American to be elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. The American Physical Society sponsors the Edward A. Bouchet Award.  In 2005 Yale, and my alma mater Howard founded the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.

Jim Gates, featured in the previous post, was the first recipient of the American Physical Society’s Edward A. Bouchet Award. Other recipients are in the queue.

Physicist Uses African Symbols for Advanced Math

National Medal of Science recipient Sylvester James Gates wrote the first doctoral dissertation at MIT on supersymmetry a key building block for String Theory. In string theory, everything in the universe is made up of one of two types of particles which always occur in pairs connected by supersymmetry. He has developed A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory called Adinkra.

For additional information including a must-hear, audio interview, see Uncovering The Codes of Reality. Also there are numerous videos of Jim Gates Secret Life. Upcoming installments of African Information Engineering will include more on Adinkra symbols.