Crosspost: The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

Written by Katrina Miller for Wired

Pictured (left to right): Andrea Bryant, LaNijah Flagg, Katrina Miller, and Ayanna Matthews are doctoral students studying physics at the University of Chicago. 

At the entrance to my lab’s clean room, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror: I look like a clown. I’m drowning in a disposable coverall that hangs off of me in droopy folds, and my size 7½ feet are swallowed up by the smallest rubber boots the lab had on hand—a men’s size 12. The thick mass of curls framing my face only accentuates the caricature.

Reaching for the box of hairnets perched on a nearby counter, I fish out a thin, papery cap with a sigh. How the hell is this going to fit over my fro? I flatten my roots and tie my hair into the tightest bun I can muscle. Stretched as far as it’ll go, the hairnet only covers the back of my head. I position another over my forehead and a third to straddle the middle. Has no physicist here ever been a woman or had to contend with hair like mine? With effort, I tug the hood of my coverall over the hairnets. The taut fabric rustles loudly in my ears as I open the door to join my peers.

I am here, in a basement lab at the University of Chicago, to work on a small-scale particle detector that might help in the search for dark matter, the invisible glue that physicists believe holds the universe together. Dark matter emits no light and, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t interact with ordinary matter in any familiar ways. But we know it exists from the way it influences the motions of the stars. The allure of dark matter is what inspired me to pursue a PhD in physics. But in more ways than one, I keep feeling like I just don’t fit.

Shout out to AAAS Mass Media Fellow and AASWomen blog contributor, Katrina Miller, for her powerful article on Black women's experiences in physics in Wired. 

Read the rest of the article at: https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/

Crosspost: The other physics problem

 Written by R.M. Davis for symmetry magazine

Black physicists say efforts to recruit and retain more Black students must concentrate on challenges they face at both Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Primarily White Institutions. Credit: Sandbox Studio, Chicago and Lauren Jackson.

Alexander Gardner mailed his application to North Carolina A&T from what was likely a military prison cell somewhere in the US South. It was the mid-1950s; Gardner would have been in his late 20s. He had run away from home at the age of 14 to join the US Merchant Marines.

Gardner had been incarcerated for punching a commanding officer who called him a racial slur. He had only an 8th grade education, but North Carolina A&T—a university located in Greensboro, NC—saw his potential. They accepted him, and he graduated in 1958 with a degree in engineering physics. Five years later, Gardner became the first Black person to earn a physics PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He returned to North Carolina A&T the year after that, this time as a member of the physics faculty.

“That’s an unbelievable story,” says Arlene Maclin, a former physics professor who credits Gardner as one of her earliest and most important mentors.

However, it’s far from the only extraordinary tale of triumph over adversity to come out of the Black physics community. And it was possible, in part, due to the unique support Gardner found at North Carolina A&T, which is classified as an HBCU, a Historically Black College or University.

HBCUs have played an important role in bringing Black students into physics. Prior to 2003, HBCUs consistently graduated the majority of Black physics-degree holders. In the year 2000, HBCUs enrolled just 13% of all Black postsecondary students but awarded a staggering 60% of physics degrees earned by Black students that year. Those numbers have been on a steady decline in the years since, but HBCUs still produce a disproportionate share of Black physics graduates today.

Read the rest of the article at: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-other-physics-problem 

Crosspost: #BlackInQuantum

Written by R.M. Davis for Symmetry Magazine

For well over a century, Black researchers have played an important role in quantum physics, but their contributions remain unknown, obscured by a legacy of racism that continues to affect Black students' participation in physics to this day. Credit: Symmetry Magazine

The sixth person to earn a doctoral degree in physics from an American institution was African American scientist Edward Alexander Bouchet. It was 1876, just 11 years after the US had adopted a constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery. 

Never again have African Americans made up such a large percentage of US physicists. In fact, it would take another 42 years before a second African American man earned a physics PhD in the United States. 

That was Elmer Imes, a contemporary of Albert Einstein, who earned his degree from the University of Michigan in 1918. His doctoral work established some of the earliest direct experimental evidence of quantum theory, making him a crucial historical figure in quantum physics and quantum information science. 

But the accomplishments of Black scientists like Imes and Bouchet are not well known, says Charles Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “Black people have been contributing to the progress of research groups for a long time, and just not really having enough of a spotlight on them… which is why when you go to Wikipedia, and you try to look people up, it's hard to find anything,” he says. 

Like Imes, Brown searches for insights into the quantum realm. And like fellow Yale graduate Bouchet, Brown finds himself in a small pool of physics PhDs: According to a survey by the American Institute of Physics, “quantum foundations and information science” ranks among the smallest subfields in physics, having granted an average of just 30 PhDs per year in 2017 and 2018. 

The US and other nations plan to grow what they’re calling the “quantum workforce,” and they’re going to need people with the right level of expertise to fill it, says Thomas Searles, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “There is a large issue of this new, burgeoning industry where there are going to be significant problems with the workforce and sustaining it,” he says. 

Physicists like Searles and Brown see an opportunity during this period of growth: to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion now, rather than trying to fix more entrenched issues later. They suggest this will require confronting systemic problems in education and academia while simultaneously investing in programs that will help Black researchers succeed. 

The hope is that there will be more physicists like Imes and Bouchet. But their stories will feature fewer frustrations and more support—and people will make sure to tell them. 

Learn more about Searles and Brown's ongoing efforts to create a sense of community and recognition among Black students passionate about physics at: 
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/black-in-quantum 

Crosspost: A physicist’s lessons about race, power, and the universe

Written by Neel Dhanesha for Vox

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in the women's studies department at the University of New Hampshire. Credit: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

When Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was a 10-year-old growing up in East Los Angeles, she came across the Errol Morris documentary A Brief History of Time, which chronicled the life of the physicist Stephen Hawking. Watching it, Prescod-Weinstein says, she realized Hawking “was being paid to use math all day to solve problems Einstein hadn’t worked out.”

For a queer Black Jewish kid from a working-class neighborhood who liked doing math, that seemed like a pretty good deal. “That was really where I got my first taste of the idea that math is kind of like the language of the universe,” Prescod-Weinstein told me.

She’s now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, where she studies dark matter and particle physics. She’s also on the core faculty of the university’s Women’s Studies department — a seemingly unusual combination that hints at the multifaceted approach she brings to her work.

In 2021, Prescod-Weinstein published The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred, a wide-ranging book that is both a scientific explainer and an argument that unjust power structures shape the world of physics. She tells stories of subatomic particles like baryons, which are the building blocks of atoms; she critiques a trend she’s seen, in which writers compare the mystery and invisibility of dark matter to the lived experiences of Black people. In a chapter called “Rape Is Part of This Scientific Story” — a chapter that grew unexpectedly out of her writing on the dark universe, and that she debated including in the book — she writes about how her own experience of sexual assault shaped her understanding of injustices in her field.

Read Dhanesha's full and fascinating interview with Dr. Prescod-Weinstein at:

https://www.vox.com/22880089/physics-race-chanda-prescod-weinstein-disordered-cosmos