306. Fear of a Black Universe (2)
1 (11m 22s):
The dozen or so posts in the theory group were very, very interactive. However, time after time, I found my attempts to interact with my peers were not reciprocated and were ignored, Even ignored. One day, a good friend Brian Keating, who was a postdoc at Caltech, was visiting our group. Brian, who is white, pulled me aside and said, I know what's going on. I know why you're not coming to your office. I overheard a conversation with some other postdocs, and they said that they wanna punish you. So what did I do to them that would warrant punishment by shunning me? My friend volunteered. The reason you're quoting Brian again, they feel that they had to work so hard to get to the top, and you got in easily through affirmative action.
1 (12m 4s):
Close quote, I must admit, harboring, now, you speaking, I must admit, harboring both disdain for and envy of my post-doctoral colleagues, Most of them grew up with privilege that I did not have, and a sense of entitlement that the enterprise of science belonged to people like them. I also presume that the relationship with physics was different from mine. So, Stephan, you just said, you know, you had a, you know, middle class background and you had a great education. So here you're really speaking to something along the lines of systemic racism as it's called now. You know, it's just kind of built into the system, even if maybe the individual people were not over overtly racist.
1 (12m 45s):
You're hinting at something deeper here. Just tell us a little bit what, what that's like to experience that.
2 (12m 51s):
Yeah, it's interesting because I sometimes feel, and I've, I've definitely, you know, gone to some great lectures and about, about the notion of systemic racism. But I think that, you know, when, when a term is used so much and, and sometimes used in, in, in certain contexts, like, you know, by the media, it loses its true meaning. And so, and I don't want to go wait, use our time to go into, into like, the definition of it. I do think that, you know, there are lots of good material in terms of the scholarly understanding of, of, of systemic racism.
2 (13m 34s):
I think that the, the first of all, I think when I use the term privilege, right, I recognize my own privilege. I also recognize that the environment that I grew up in gave me certain advantages, which played out later on once I, you know, became a professor, for example, and I had the opportunity now to train other scientists. I had other ways of think training them other, other, other modalities, you know, that if you wanna call it one style, you know, you know, the same way a musician will train younger musicians, you might have the different styles. And I think that came into play later on that advantage in that privilege that I had.
2 (14m 18s):
So the privilege I think I'm referring to, and why it's baked into the system may have something to do with, I think the idea that we grow up where we, we, we grow up with certain images or presumptions about who does science, who is a good scientist, what do they sound like, what do they look like, You know, just cultural things. And I think that, you know, when we look at, I think some of my colleagues back then post-OC colleagues, you know, I was just an alien.
2 (14m 59s):
I, I mean, I had to, I had just moved from London. I was playing a lot of music back then. I had long dreadlocks. I, you know, and, and I, and I was working on weird things too. So I think like, you know, my characterization of what maybe a good physicist would look like to them was, and also it didn't fit in maybe with the culture, the culture of that place at that time. And I think that the presumption was well, because he looks and acts and talks and he, you know, he, he doesn't look like, he doesn't look and act and talk and quack like a duck.
2 (15m 40s):
A duck mean a good, maybe a good theoretical physicist. And also people that look like him who go through these types of, you know, come to places like where we're at usually they're probably not, and then this is a presumption. They're probably not, they probably didn't do the work. They probably got like, you know, a, you know, a hall pass maybe. Because again, there's a misunderstand of actually what affirmative action is and how it functions. So I think that, I think that that was my reading as to why then, you know, they would really feel, so, I think they generally felt like, man, we were slighted here.
2 (16m 21s):
I mean, this, this guy just got, he doesn't really know his stuff. What I think upset me, though, they didn't give me the chance. Some of them didn't give me the chance. Now, the good thing though, is that some did give me the chance, right? And, and, you know, I end up writing papers with some of them, and some, some of them are now my colleagues up till today. So, again, I think, you know, I wrote that part in, in the book I wrote about that to kind of, to kind of set the stage, because the rest of that chapter is actually show that, you know, how did I respond to that? How did I deal with that? Did I just, you know, did I just, I don't know, what's the word give in or just, you know, process the hurt and maybe the anger in a way that, that debilitated me even further.
2 (17m 12s):
What did I do about that? And I think the rest of the book, I kind of, or the rest of that chapter, I kind of go into, into, you know, how I was able to try to make that a productive situation.
1 (17m 24s):
Yeah. Well, we're still dealing with race in America is, it's quite evident. And that is one of the possible side effects of affirmative action is, you know, white people thinking that black people are not qualified or whoever, Hispanic or Native American or whatnot. And they're only here because of this affirmative action thing. It seemed clear enough to me. I know you pretty well, Stephan. I know your work. I've read your books. I, I went to that technical talk you gave at, at at Chapman that I, I didn't really understand, but I was impressed. It's obvious, you know, your stuff, you know, you're not just bullshitting here and you know, you're a black guy, so you got in. No, it's obvious. So just giving somebody the chance that that's really all, all it takes and, and it's good.
1 (18m 5s):
Some people did. Now let's address the outsider thing, right? Right there in the title subtitle, your book, An Outsider's Guide. I have to tell you, you know, I get lots of letters. I'm sure you get these as well from true outsiders. These are people who have no training in physics at all. They have a theory of everything. You know, Newton was wrong, Einstein was wrong, fineman was wrong. And I've worked it all out, and I'll share the Nobel Prize with you if you help me with the math, Right? And now those are outsiders to them. You are an insider, right? So when you say you're an outsider on the inside, what you're really talking about is sort of a, I don't know, like a bell curve of, you know, where you're in the middle or you're kind of two standard deviations out in, in kind of creativity or braveness of putting forth new ideas.
1 (18m 49s):
And you're like three or four standard deviations out maybe from the mainstream, but you're still in that box, right? I mean, you are a trained physicist. You have degrees, postdocs, professorships, you are in the club. It's not like you're some outside outsider,
2 (19m 3s):
Right? A hundred percent agree. And yeah, in, and that was a hard thing to kind of like to, to address in the book. Cause you know, let's say that maybe there was some slick marketing scheme going on behind, you know, behind the scenes about, you know, somebody getting the book thinking, Oh, alright, this, you know, this guy is one of us there. I mean, there's a part of me that like, you know, I have a soft spot of course for the outsider and any sort of outsider. But I, yeah, I do think that, like, you know, where I was coming from with this is, you know, here's the best way I like to put it. Cause my best analogies are always come back to music.
2 (19m 44s):
John Coltrane could play, you know, in jazz music, there's this thing about playing inside, meaning that you're playing the chord changes, you're playing within the structure, the harmonic structure of the music, and you know how to do that. That takes skill, technique, practice, and you know, a lot of musical education in terms of harmonic theory and yada yada, right? So John Coltrane is an insider player, but he also, from time to time, will choose to play outside. Meaning that, you know, Coltrane and sometimes, again, I don't wanna, you know, bastardize the, the term, but avant garde or free jazz, you know, train embraced that to, he embraced it.
2 (20m 27s):
He embraced other players who were outside players. He embraced Far Sanders, right? Because he felt that they had something to, to, to contribute, to give to him the person that had all this knowledge, right? About music. And I feel that there's a healthy balance of like, you know, when you attain a certain level of, of expertise, you know, competence and all this stuff. Like, a good example was my, my first PhD advisor, who I always like to talk about, I usually talk about this guy every day, is actually, I have a portrait of him, of, in my living room, Leon Cooper, right?
2 (21m 9s):
Who won Nobel Prize for super conductivity. And so he would always say, you know, not always, but he'd oftentimes say to me and say to us, Why do I wanna talk to people that know exactly what I know? And of course, the statement is like, I know a lot, right? He wants to talk to people. I could teach him something new. And I, of course, that's the way I would legitimate, Oh, that's why you're talking this to this idiot, right? So when I was, so there's something right about a kind of a healthy, open mindedness, even when you're, when you are a master, when you've mastered something. And I, I think that's part of embracing an outsiderness. So you're kind of, even if you're, you're the most inside person, right?
2 (21m 52s):
You're, you, you are the king, you're the emperors now. You want to have no, no clothes on,
1 (21m 58s):
Right? Yeah, I like that. I
2 (22m 0s):
Love, But there's a danger to it. But there's a danger to it though. Yeah.
1 (22m 3s):
Yeah. Well, you, you might be spitballing creative new ideas, most of which are wrong. That's the danger, right? So you have, you gotta figure out how to sort 'em out.
2 (22m 12s):
Well, one interesting thing that, since I've written a book, my inbox has been gotten even more flooded, and I've gotten even more mail from, you know, from my outside crew.
1 (22m 25s):
Like, what you mean? People with alternative theories of physics,
