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From 1991 – 1993, Professor Gates was the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University and served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Atmospheres (CSTEA) funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Grad Students - Biography – Sylvester James Gates, Jr.
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Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed...
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Talks - Biography – Sylvester James Gates, Jr.
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TEACHING: Courses Taught at Brown University, or “studio...
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Below is a selection of YouTube videos of Prof. S.J.Gates,...
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Macquarie University Big History Anthropocene Conference...
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KONSTANTINOS KOUTROLIKOS, PhD — CURRICULUM VITAE...
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Group/People - Biography – Sylvester James Gates, Jr.
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The research focus of Prof. Gates is on mathematical models...
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Jim Gates is a theoretical physicist. He is currently the...
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Sylvester James “Jim” Gates, Jr. is a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He is a John S. Toll Professor of Physics, and currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science.
Aug 30, 2012 · Physicist and physics professor Sylvester James Gates, Jr. was born on December 15, 1950 in Tampa, Florida to Charlie Engels and Sylvester James Gates, Sr. His father worked for the U.S. Army, causing the family to move many times.
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- Biography of Sylvester James Gates, Jr.
- Early life
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- Jim's career
- The importance of science
Sylvester James Gates Jr. is a distinguished professor, scientist, and member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. His work is highly influential and stands at the forefront of some of the deepest mysteries about the Universe.
By David Baker, adapted by Newsela
Sylvester James Gates Jr. is a distinguished professor, scientist, and member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. His work is highly influential and stands at the forefront of some of the deepest mysteries about the Universe.
Sylvester James Gates Jr. has long considered himself a “simple country theoretical physicist” and prefers to go by Jim Gates. Jim’s father, Sylvester James Gates Sr. (1925-2007), was in the army, and a veteran of the ‘‘Red Ball Express’’ during World War II. The oldest of four children, Jim’s early years were spent moving from place to place. When he was 4 years old, his mother, Charlie Anglin Gates (1919-1962), took him to a movie called Spaceways, starring Howard Duff. It was the first movie Jim can remember seeing. Although he only figured out what movie it was many years later, the images stuck with him. He saw a rocket launch, he saw spacesuits, and even women venturing into space – a very progressive idea in the 1950s. This movie got Jim’s imagination whir-ring. The imagery planted a seed in Jim’s mind. That evening, 4-year-old Jim came home and tried to explain rockets to his father. But his mother possessed an artistic temperament and had no interest in science and technology, so why did she take him to see this movie? It turns out Howard Duff was married to Ida Lupino, one of his mother’s two favorite actresses – the other being Loretta Young. In a way, Jim often jokes, Ida Lupino got him into theoretical physics.
Jim was a child brought up in the cultural atmosphere of the space race, where the idea of the U.S. competing with the Soviets as they both reached for the stars was often at the top of people’s minds. It was certainly a rich atmosphere to continue to feed Jim’s already considerable imagination. Jim’s dad took care to foster this, and four years later, he brought Jim some books on space travel. The 8-year-old Jim had a revelation: the stars weren’t just dots of light in the sky, they were places to where one might travel. And science was the way to get there. Like many kids, Jim decided he wanted to be-come an astronaut or else a scientist.
Jim’s parents put a huge emphasis on education. His father had never graduated high school, though his mother had, so when his dad was studying math for his equivalence exams, Jim took a particular interest. Also, one day Jim’s father brought home a set of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Google of that age. Jim was leafing through the many pages of information on everything from history to geography to literature. He came across something called “The Schrodinger Equation.” And there he saw some very weird language, the most bizarre set of symbols. Jim was able to recognize it was math of some kind, because amid all the symbols there were equal signs and plus signs. He hoped that one day he would be able to understand this mysterious language. He would later describe the experience as like walking along the seashore, finding a beautiful seashell, picking it up, listening for a moment, and then moving on.
Jim’s mother died when he was 11. It was a very painful experience for him. As a result, he retreated into a world of fantasy and imagination: reading science fiction, comic books, drawing, and making up his own characters. That only inspired him more on to the path of science and discovery. When he got older, he noticed a lot of his friends had ceased to use their imaginations as often. Jim continued to do so and it served him well. One of Jim’s favorite scientific figures, Albert Einstein, once said, the best tool a physicist has – way more than just knowledge – is imagination.
When Jim was 14 he watched a TV show called Make Room for Daddy. The episode had a nephew visit, a character who was supposed to be a genius, and he went to a school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jim was excited to hear there was a school where you only studied what he considered “the good stuff,” math, physics, and engineering, and decided he wanted to go there.
High school was a very interesting time for Jim. In those days, U.S. schools were segregated as is often still the de-facto case today. The African-American teachers at Jim’s school in Orlando were great. Due to segregation, they felt it was very important to put their all into the job. Jim’s favorite teacher was a man named Freeman Coney, who taught Jim physics. It was in his class that Jim saw “the closest thing to magic” ever in his life. Coney showed how you could use math to figure out what objects in the real world do. Math was not just a bunch of numbers on a page or a game we per-form in our heads, Jim realized. It tells us how the world works with stunning precision. After two weeks in the course, Jim realized he wanted to be a physicist, but was still thinking about becoming an astronaut.
Jim’s work is of profound importance to how we understand the Universe. But what does a physicist do? When Jim was growing up, he was intrigued by the mysterious language, the set of symbols, he had seen in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Math happens to be the only known human language that is accurately constructed enough to de-scribe nature in all its complexity.
So when Jim’s wife, Dr. Dianna Elizabeth Abney, gets asked the question, “What does he do?” she likes to say, “He makes stuff up for a living.” And like a novelist who strings nouns and verbs together to tell stories, Jim uses math to tell stories. But the real test for a physicist is to tell stories that accurately reflect the natural world.
Another way to think of it is that a physicist is like a composer. But instead of using musical notation and a series of sounds to express something beautiful, a physicist uses equations. The people in a com-poser’s audience judge the quality of the music for its expression and its ability to stir deep feelings. A physicist’s audience is nature, and it is the “audience of nature” that provides the judgment.
So when Jim’s wife says, “He makes up stuff for a living,” it is not too far off. Jim must use math to tell stories, or, rather, to construct theories. When new facts arrive that current theories don’t account for, you need to make up a new theory. There are things about the Universe that classical physics don’t quite explain. Jim’s work with string theory and super-symmetry suggests that if we want to understand our reality, we have to craft a new story. While at graduate school, Jim discovered that super-symmetry equations might tell us more about the Universe than anything else. If true, the new story that we write about nature could show us amazing things. It could even result in a simple piece of mathematics that describes our entire reality in one elegant story. And that is the essence of the goal of science – finding the most accurate way to describe the Universe in which we live.
Different levels of magnification of matter:
1.Macroscopic level: Matter
After graduation, Jim did postdoctoral work at Harvard. From 1979-1980, Ron McNair encouraged Jim to apply to NASA and become an astronaut. For a time, Jim pursued his other childhood dream. Eventually, NASA informed Jim that he didn’t have the “right stuff” and he went off to do a postdoc at Caltech from 1980-1982 with some of the giants of modern physics: Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and John Henry Schwarz. Jim reembarked on a career concerning his other passion – physics. From 1982-1984, Jim taught mathematics at MIT. In 1983, Jim co-wrote a book called Super-space or 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry. The book contained one of the only advanced treatments of supersymmetry for over a decade and remains a staple for students of physics today. In 1984, Jim began teaching physics at the University of Maryland where he continues to teach today, and from 1990-1992 also did some teaching at Howard University.
In 1986, Jim lost a friend. Ron McNair was aboard the space shuttle Challenger when it broke apart shortly after launch. Jim remembers exactly where he was when heard the news. He was in a bank on campus at the University of Maryland, and a woman came running into the room shouting “the shuttle exploded!” Some people thought she was referring to the campus bus system called “the shuttle” which was always break-ing down. A look of horror came over her face, and she said, “No, the real shuttle has exploded.” In that moment, Jim knew what had happened to Ron. He had seen Ron six months before at a roast in his honor, where they joked about the old days. When the tragedy happened, Jim dealt with his grief by telling stories about his old friend. Since then, Jim has watched his old friend become a historic figure, which Jim says is a pretty frightening process.
Today, Jim Gates is Regents Professor, John S. Toll Professor of Physics, and Center for String & Particle Theory Director at the University of Maryland. He was the first African-American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the U.S. In 2006, Jim published another book called L’arte della Fiscia (The Art of Physics). In 2009, Jim was appointed to the Maryland State Board of Education and almost simultaneously to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Even today, Jim is not enamored of titles. That is just as well, because his many achievements and honors speak for themselves. He holds many positions, holds many awards and several honorary degrees, and has appeared in a large number of documentaries for science outreach.
In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Jim the National Medal of Science for his considerable contributions to modern physics and scientific outreach. The ceremony took place in 2013. This was a major scientific award. He was nominated by the for-mer president of the University of Maryland, then a set of experts were asked to pro-vide input on what Jim had done with his scientific career, then another group of people evaluated that input, then still another group decided if he deserved the award. Like the Medal of Honor for bravery and the Medal of Art for beautiful expression, the Medal of Science is an important recognition of a person’s contribution to science, with a long list of brilliant people going all the way back to 1962 – the days when Jim was nurturing his imagination with science fiction, comic books, and a thirst to explore the Universe.
In 2013, Jim became the first African-American physicist to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in its 150-year history. At the time, a friend pointed out to Jim that “he had finally made it into the history books alongside of Ron.”
Jim has written or co-written more than 200 papers and articles. Jim has been teach-ing for 43 consecutive years, researching for 39 consecutive years, doing media out-reach on behalf of science for 20 consecutive years, and advising on public policy at national and state levels for five consecutive years. Jim thus has four careers. In fact, he’s got a budding fifth career by lending his charismatic “narrator’s voice” as a spokesman for the “Potential of Us” campaign, where he stresses how connecting minds through technology is vital to the collective learning of humanity. Because of connectivity, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you can constantly talk to your friends and colleagues and form a creative network, the power of which has never before been seen in human history. For 200,000 years, humans have collaborated generation after generation to invent everything from stone tools to skyscrapers. Now, the immense amount of connectivity between us means that innovations may be radically accelerating.
Jim’s wife is a chief health officer for one of the counties in Maryland. Their twin children, Delilah Elizabeth Abney Gates and Sylvester James Gates III, completed their Bachelor of Science degrees at the University of Maryland. Their son studied biology and their daughter, like Jim, studied both mathematics and physics. Their twins, as of 2015, have been both admitted to do graduate research, to continue to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Jim has urged them to ‘‘Think Different’’ if they are to make innovative contributions to science. It is also a surprise to Jim, who says, ‘‘I never thought I would become the father of a scientist and certainly not two.’’
To Jim, science is important. We must strive to increase the storehouse of human knowledge which is ultimately used to improve the quality of human life. In this sense, scientists are working not just on behalf of us, but our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-great-great grandchildren. Science is a commitment to humanity. For most of human existence, we’ve lived in a global environment that has been very gentle and congenial for us. In the next century, millennium, or tens of thou-sands of years, if the environment becomes more hostile, only technology will prolong our survival as a species. And for that technology, we need to rely on science.
In that sense, Jim feels it is important to be a lifelong learner. Most people disengage from science after they leave school because it is not strictly relevant to their daily lives. But science is constantly putting us in the position of redefining what it is to be human. Even those people who don’t pursue science with their daily lives need to en-gage with these ideas, in order to discuss what it is we want for our future. This will not happen if people disengage from science. In that sense, the grand narrative that science tells us about humanity and the Universe is important to everyone.
[Sources and attributions]
Jim Gates is a theoretical physicist. He is currently the Brown Theoretical Physics Center Director, Ford Foundation Professor of Physics, Affiliate Mathematics Professor, and a Watson Institute for International Studies & Public Affairs Faculty Fellow at Brown University.
Sylvester James (Jim) Gates, Jr. is a theoretical physicist. He is a John S. Toll Professor of Physics and a Distinguished University Professor. He currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science and serves as a Professor of Physics with the Physics Department as well as a Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at the ...
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Sylvester James Gates Jr. holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science. During his decades with the UMD Department of Physics, he was named a Distinguished University Professor, University System of Maryland Regents Professor and John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland.
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