A Quantum Life with Hakeem Oluseyi

[Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson you're a personal astrophysicist and today we're going to feature an exclusive conversation with a fellow astrophysicist of mine well we'll introduce him in just a moment but let me get chuck out of the way here check hey yes get sucked out of the way no no sorry i didn't how many times have i heard that i didn't mean it that way now i just feel like i'm at thanksgiving dinner it just came out that way i got it yeah all right so who we have with us today is i think i pronounced that right oh you say did i get that right hakeem everywhere but in nigeria that means i didn't get it right well because the name is a statement they demand it be stated like a statement oh you got to get in it okay let me hear you say the whole name go yeah oh hakeem so you got to get in it yeah they're nigeria only they they they right all right all right they don't care in wakanda they don't care wakanda no it's yeah they speak english in wakanda apparently right yes so you are a fellow astrophysicist and i don't think we've met before so uh that's actually a good sign that means um that means there are enough black people who do astrophysics that it's possible that two of them don't know each other might have never met right okay well well well it turns out that very briefly in 2002 at the american astronomical society meeting we did meet i was standing in an empty poster hall monitoring the snap posters the supernova acceleration probe right which okay kmw first which is now named after a brilliant woman uh and so what happens is you walk up and i'm like who is this black astrologer this is i don't know and i turned and looked around and saw your badge and i just you know i was looking at who are the other black astrophysicists in the world and i just discovered it i'm like oh neil tyson and you're like hi how are you [Laughter] i was fresh back from silicon valley i kid you not no my first stop okay all right okay so we did our world line okay so here's the thing that's right um you met neal he just has never met you that's right that's right until now all right so we got this so hakeem you came out with a book a book let me get the title straight here a quantum life yeah you don't waste any time just putting it right out quantum life uh my unlikely journey from the street to the stars we'll get to that in a minute but just want to get the rest of your resume out here so we've got you as uh an affiliated professor at george mason university is that right okay and thank you george mason president-elect of the national society of black physicists right and you used to uh be a space education lead at nasa and a chief science officer at discovery communications this is like not only discovery channel but like 10 other channels that they control probably other stuff too is that right well mostly focus those three focus on science channel discovery and animal planet we're sort of the science uh realm of discovery communication gotcha so if they got any science wrong they'd send the letters to you absolutely absolutely and but what intrigues me here is you're also an inventor and you've got 11 patents wow 11 patents what's your favorite invention that you have made you know what it's the one that i can brag and say it's in all your chips and it's not because it's that amazing it's guacamole is in my chicken not those chips thanks for inventing guacamole i love it but you know i worked at a large silicon valley company that puts chips in all your computers so if you develop a technology but basically my work um has made it more efficient and also helped with moore's law to keep progressing oh cool okay all right all right so so this is part of your i mean i'm calling you an astrophysicist but as you list the rest of the stuff you've done that gets us back to the subtitle of your book my unlikely journey from this street to the stars now now here's what i want to know uh is this book one of these i was a poor black child is it one of those kind of stories is that what's happening in here man it is not it really isn't yeah it isn't because my story is so unique and it's so epic that the reason why i wrote the book but we'll decide whether it's epic don't you be putting that on your own stuff we'll be the judge that's okay they told me you know i'm here discovering and everybody keeps telling me oh man you got to write a book you got to write a book because my life story is so crazy you know how you meet somebody and you throw out something you're like holy crap what what haven't you done what haven't you been through right that was my life and so and you actually obeyed them and decided to write this up okay all right so okay so so i got to tell you the truth so i you know lindsay sent me a copy of the book lindsay one of our producers yes one of our senior producers yeah a couple nights ago and i only had time for that night to read it that because i knew what my schedule was and i got through about uh at this about 250 275 pages of the book uh and that's how good it was i was reading it as homework because i just wanted to be prepared but i ended up reading it for enjoyment which is why i read 275 pages in one sitting okay now lindsay didn't send me the book so you should run the damn interview i know she did it all right i'll send you through it i will no i will fumble through this and then chuck you come in and make it better as i mess it up okay no worries so so tell me so so so where are you born that's right so i lived in some like historic communities i was born in new orleans and my home community is new orleans east my father is from rural mississippi so i spent half of my you know pre-18 life there but also i have a foothold in south central los angeles man where he has a bunch of cousins who are actually uh crips or were they the bloods oh geez no they were crips the crips yeah they were og banks and you know murders and went to prison for a couple of decades and these are people you hung out with absolutely yeah man i've hung out with everybody like you know and that's the thing about uh the current life uh you know the current moment because in science we have this sort of conflict you know on the one hand if somebody makes a mistake let's cancel them but on the other hand yo let's go into the prisons let's deal with the um you know the people that are incarcerated and help them up through education and science so you know i believe in redemption and because of so many people in my life i've seen well i'm gonna push back on you hakeem just a little bit i don't i don't think that your story was one of redemption either not mine no not here he's talking about the other people oh okay i didn't even read the book and i knew that chuck well listen i never said i was smart just because i could read 275 pages in a night okay it just means i could read they're little pages okay so what you say what you're saying is not to put words in your mouth but what you're i think what you're saying is your environment and the people and the company you kept was quite an exposure quite a baptism into the challenges of inner city life and the life of poverty yeah absolutely you know look everybody's ready to beat you up including your own family my family happened to have an entrepreneurial spirit so nice uh and and very highly competitive so i got into that life at the age of nine very seriously and it was something that i was drawn to i was with that life which life your tournament i call it my dark side right your dark life and cry it was like oh gotcha gotcha gotcha right that's the whole thing about it that's what's quantum about it right you have this state of uh superposition between these two two quantum states i get it two quantum states and i'm existing in both of them simultaneously nerd and gangster right gang's the nerd okay but you're a black nerd so that makes you a blurred just to be clear okay just to be clear all right so tell tell us about how is it that you kept your compass direction throughout the crime the violence the muggings the you know how does it yeah because most people don't and there's probably still in jail in prison yeah yeah because i didn't want to stay that way right and for me it was very simple tomorrow i want to live indoors and eat right and so when i was finishing high school i'm like oh what do i do oh the military so i joined the military then i get out of the military and at that point i'm aimless and some friends convinced me to go to college so now in college you know you have your dorm paid for by your your financial plan which for me you know one of the things people been talking to me about all my life is this free education we get that missed me somehow so with my student loans i was able to pay for my tuition housing food but then college is coming to an end and i had no idea what to do and luckily a woman named cynthia mcintyre claude pooh and a coot-box showed up on campus and said hey we have this thing we're starting called the national conference of black physics students so let me tell you why uh how you can become a physicist which i really didn't see as my career i became a physics major because physics was is what was easy to me and the reason why it was easy is because i fell in love with albert einstein when i was 10 years old and just studied it but even before that i fell in love with logic problems right and and so i would solve all these logic problems so even though i was like grossly undereducated by the time i graduated high school i was passionate about the universe and i had taught myself a lot of physics without knowing so you were incompletely educated you still had passion for learning which is a very important thing and and i think you're being a little humble because you are clearly an auto died and have been your entire life and that means i don't even know what that means what is that what is an auto die that is that a good thing or a bad thing did you use a customer did you just no it means that you're able to teach yourself you are so you are self didactic you tell yourself so so instead of saying he's self-taught you call him an autodidact yes yes okay so i must be a biologist i don't know what to help chuck okay but seriously i think the other thing that is a a bit under looked i mean um under appreciated and i say this not just to you but to everyone listening what people see in you is the case and you should you know people often look at you and see something and because you are in your current situation you can't see it and so throughout your life according to your book there were always people who were like hey man you should hey man you should and there's a spark of something in there right the reason why they do that is because they see it and now look where you are they saw it and it was there but here's the thing you didn't go quite far enough in the book okay he became a serial murderer and then no no i did not but that's what people saw so i'll give you a funny a story from the book so in 2013 i was at uc berkeley doing summer research and i ran into a graduate student friend and he said hakeem remember that story you told me in grad school and i kind of forgotten about it so basically what had happened is because of my life of crime and the way i was living wrong i dropped out of college okay and i didn't want to live the life i was living anymore and to be honest i continued after this relapse and relapse type thing um so i got a job and the only job i can get was as a janitor at a nearby hotel i was making four dollars an hour getting something like 20 some odd bucks a week i got a small apartment deep in the hood and i don't even have enough money to eat so the way i eat most days is i eat people's leftovers from room service that's how i was eating then i get my big break or so i think and that is the bellhop hotel gets fired right and i'm thinking yeah i get a hundred dollars in tips in a day but guess what according to the hotel i was in bellhop material right i wasn't front door material and so my friend who i was speaking to in 2013 he said you know what to me that story encapsulates what it's like to be a black man in america because they didn't realize that the guy standing in front of them was a stanford phd physicist all they could see was the janitor right but that is because uh they they were trying to hire a freaking bellhop so you also got to consider the source you know so i won't belabor the point but i'm right hakeem all right wait wait there's way more to this story we got to take a break but i came i want to know what branch of the service you you went to how did you end up in stanford how did you end up even in college in the first place and so i i don't want to jump ahead too fast because i'm still in south central l.a with you right here in my in my own head so when we come back more of hakeem and let me get his last name hakeem coming up from the depths of the uh of american poverty and crime to be a leading astrophysicist when star talk continues we're back with an exclusive interview with hakeem ulusei who is a fellow astrophysicist my first time really officially meeting the guy and apparently chuck got a copy of the book before this interview because he wrote a memoir and chuck read the book and i don't i haven't even seen the book so chuck i think i should just go to you know go have lunch now and you finish the interview no cause i'm hungry too so okay so it's my a quantum life my unlikely journey from the street to the stars and in a quanta are sort of states of existence of particles and if you apply that to your life um i came you told us in the first segment that you were this sort of street kid but you were also this nerd and the two generally don't have bridges between them and when you don't they're separate quantum states but they coexist in the same body so it's a superposition of these two quantum states if we're going to run with the physics of it but so so at what point did you say maybe i'll go to the military was that to to to try to bring some order to your life and get a hot meal every day no just like many other things i had no direction and someone came along and said hey how about you try this so what happened is at our high school now let me tell you about my high school i grew up in heidelberg high school in jasper county mississippi all black a mile and a half down the road heidelberg academy all white right and so we were all told to go wait it can't have just been a mile and a half down the road they have to been like railroad tracks or something or freeway nothing nothing like that you could actually just walk from oh yeah it was just they made it especially cruel they were like we're not even going to put any railroad tracks you're not even across the tracks right you're gonna be able to look right down the street and see what you're missing okay yeah yeah yeah what was the question yeah no no sorry sorry so just how did how did you land in the armed services and which branch was it yeah so i was in the u.s navy so it was a very lucky thing for me what happened was we were all ushered into the cafeteria and we were given the armed services vocational aptitude battery exam and i would kill all standardized exams everything but the math and so so what happened was a few weeks later i get called to the principal's office which was not an uncommon occurrence but when i got there he blew me away with what he said he asked me he said what are you doing after high school and i said uh i'm gonna go to college and he goes cause i knew that's what you're supposed to do and he said how are you gonna pay for it and i said well i'm a good musician i'm a good student i'll get a scholarship and he's like let me introduce you to someone he takes me into his inner office and in there in this dress whites is senior chief gage the navy recruiter he stands up looks me in the eye puts out his hand and goes hi look the most i can offer you was 20 000 a year this is 1983 right when he said that number my mother's voice went off in my head because i i remember her bragging about my brother-in-law earning fifteen thousand dollars one year and this guy just offered me twenty was that twenty thousand dollars a year after you get out for you then to spend on college is that no money i don't know this is be this is full-time navy career right right so i joined the neighborhood i think that was going to be my career forever they were going to put him in the nuclear program he was going to go nuke yeah pass the nuke test but then my recruiter was like dude you're so amazing you know what i think i can get you in the academy but he had never done the process so it was too late but he did find this program designed to take enlisted people and convert them to officers but it was people from backgrounds that were undereducated so they gave you a year of education and they had two math classes the regular math class and a remedial math class now we have a facebook group for all of us that were in this boost 85 86 class they think it's hilarious that they were in the regular class and the astrophysicist to be was in a remedial class right but in that remedial class we were taken from arithmetic through calculus in one year before arriving i never heard the word calculus in my life i did luckily i didn't get kicked out until i completed the algebra portion okay so so just to recap so this this standardized exam you took you did really well on all parts except the math part and you did so poorly on the math part but so well on the other part that they said they brought you in the back office but then they put you in the remedial math class is that did i get that right it's similar ish to that you you had to take a placement exam and that's what landed me in the in the remedial class i got it okay all right so then you became a fast study and this you pick it up and then you go to the navy and and what do they do with you in the navy oh man so i start off in a nuclear program then i transfer to this program called boost and it's run by the marines and man do they kick do the marine do marines kick your butt so i my discipline level so just to remind people the marines are actually a branch of the navy in case anybody needed to remember that but also there are two kinds of nukes there's the nuclear submarines which is just an energy source and then they're nuclear weapons so which of those were you nuclear submarines in fact i had befriended a former nuclear submarine captain and i would sit around with him talking about his uh he's retired and became an instructor at boost and i would you know just love to hear his war story so i thought i was going to be the captain of my sub someday wow so but then you had to you couldn't serve because you had a skin condition and you can't be is that the deal absolutely so you know how it is if you don't have health health insurance you don't go to the doctor so i had this horrible skin condition my entire life and i got diagnosed for it properly for the first time in the navy and they were like oh sorry you can't be in the navy with this because it impacts your readiness it really was horrific i must say and i didn't get proper treatment until almost a decade later when i was in graduate school wait wait so it's like a some kind of psoriasis or something what what is an atomic government it's an incredibly severe case of atopic dermatitis like have you seen me in my youth i i scratched so much i was hairless and i was several shades darker for breaking all the melanocytes or whatever they're called in my skin uh yeah it was a it was a mess man and i was in pain 100 of the time of course my torso yeah wow okay so that's all right damn you know you should write a book okay so wait so over all this time you're you're reading einstein and other sort of fun physics and the bible's in there too so how did the bible show up in your life yeah well listen i was in church every sunday you know wherever we live we moved every year and several times every year right uh and several times in some years and everywhere we went my mother didn't care what the denomination was we're always in the black community for the most part and you were going to church um and you know being a little scholarly dude you know you know how it is i became voracious with books uh so when i was um in mississippi my brother-in-law let me know that dude you're not sitting around while everybody else eight years of and older going to work at 12 years old you're going out there you're hauling pulpwood in those woods for my father and brothers and if you don't know what holly pope wood is you don't want to know so okay it's it is crazy hard work and for a child you know it's criminal damn near but um a few days out there my skin erupts head to toe right and so i'm left at home every day and i'm like searching for reading material and there's the big children's version of the king james bible and the regular version so i just spent day after day sitting there and i devoured the bible from cover to cover and the next year i was the adult sunday school teacher okay okay teaching adults teaching adults oh yeah yeah so i started off with the kids and then i moved up to teaching the adults because you know i had so much insight uh at that point and you know i you know how it is when you're uh you have that process of brain it's one thing to have read the bible and know what's in it it's another thing to have digested it so that you can now teach lessons to people in bible school that's a whole other level right yeah it is but it doesn't it happens automatically right you start making connections and you start and for me no it doesn't happen automatically it happened automatically for you just think about it i mean by the way it's not unique to the bible just because you got an a in your physics class doesn't mean the next day you can start teaching that very same class because teaching it requires some deeper insights that enable you to communicate what you just learned and it's not just a recitation of a fact that just came off the page so that's right so all right so yeah don't stop trying to think everyone is as smart as you human humans are dope i'm a human you're a human chuck's a human yeah [Laughter] but i do think neil is right in this that people who are in your position feel as though oh well everybody does this and it's not really the case you know and it's funny because i had a teacher who that was how he taught us he would say all right so you think you got it and we and when you said yes he would say now teach it to me and that's how you measure that that's how you got your grades well here's the thing though were you interested in that that helped how about how did you think when you were interested in things because i would come to you easier it would come easier i agree absolutely and i was surrounded by people like my good friend chris morgan right he finished high school he's been working a job ever since didn't even consider going to college right and in fact we were chatting and i was like what are you doing after high school he was like nothing you know it was like i thought okay supposed to go to college or the military right uh but look that dude was brilliant he was kicking my ass we would play games you know he was chris was dragging me and i was surrounded by brilliant people even now and one of the worst things that happens you go home and you want to hear the wisdom of your homies but because you got some fat some fancy degree they're like oh i can't talk to you man i'm like nah man i need the wisdom that's in your head too right right right right in all walks of life all work you have some good friends because when i go home and i see my friends i'm like i want to hear nothing this dude i've known you my whole life use a dumb ass if i ever met one well you know i do but listen now when i started talking science i had this one friend he'd always go that he go with that stuff again like they didn't want to hear that they didn't want to hear the science yeah right right well so what's this about daydreaming and why that was dangerous uh did you you day dreamed a lot as a kid i still do i still do man i still do i just daydreamed up four big bangs last week what do you mean by four big bangs because we think of it as one big bang right so to us physicists you know we know that you know matter and all this stuff is an illusion and we live in this universal fields so imagine you got something like swimming pool of jello right okay and you have several them one's green one's blue one's red one's yellow and you just merge them together in one right so that's like all these fields merge together so we have the inflaton field goes from this high energy to low energy boom gives all this money to space field that's the first bang space expands rapidly as a result second bang but that rapid explosion of space causes it to fill with matter and energy suddenly pow right but it's equal amounts of matter and antimatter which annihilate boom fourth bank okay chuck he's still on drugs apparently that's for banks come on now let's have a look at the authorities now but it's core the fair beyond field right it sends its energy into the electromagnetic field it's like energy goes from infinite field to space field to fairview on field to electromagnetic field and then what has happened space stretches it out right okay so so is this something you daydream recently or when you were younger last week last week okay i've been i don't know all right so when did you when what was the transition between uh physics and astrophysics when you finally you know when you find sense finally descended upon you and you realize the universe is cooler than anything else yeah so the thing about the universe i've been attracted to it from day one i've been attracted to nature but i was also attracted to weirdness right so i learned you know my my friend told me that hey you know if you're under 18 you can't be held to a contract so i used to order those time life books you know yeti the the you know bigfoot all that kind of stuff and you know i got into comics my mississippi cousins introduced me to marvel and dc comics and i loved it so when i hit einstein and relativity i'm like this is just like that stuff like the miracles in the bible sci-fi all that stuff except it's real yeah exactly it's real and then i was like i gotta learn this so i started teaching myself relativity at the age of ten and i just struggled with it and i didn't realize that i how well i knew it until i won first place in physics in the mississippi state science fair right and these professors started coming at me and you know i didn't know anything else about physics but i knew i knew that um and so in college what ends up happening is i take my first physics class realize this has to be my major and then i get accepted miraculously though strategically at stanford for graduate school and when i talk to all the professors they have one african-american professor i wanted to do experimental astrophysics astrophysics i felt was where the natural world met weirdness and hoof let's do it yeah that's true i i gotta give i gotta agree with that so where did you go to college before stanford tougaloo college yeah tougaloo in mississippi in mississippi that's right i would say that was their loo is motto right no i just made that up um we got to take another break when we come back i want to understand hakeem uh what this obsession you had growing up with compulsively counting things uh and a little more about your very unlikely quantum life on star talk we're back star talk i got checked nice with you chuck hey tweeting chuck nice comic and i got my a special exclusive guest for this interview hakeem and hakeem you're on social media i am yes what do we call you how do we find you on twitter if you put hakeem olushi in twitter that is my handle there and no one else has that twitter name yes okay yeah o-l-u-s-e-y-i again there's a facebook page as well i presume there is i'm not there as much i i suck in that way okay no but i do have instagram and i have a first initial middle initial hmo luchadi h m o usai okay all right thanks for that for that info so uh we learned from your profile that you you counted things as a child and i feel obsessively compulsively and i still and is that a good thing or a bad thing well i wouldn't see a psychologist because i thought it was a problem because my eyes divert to count things in the room around me right and so if you're doing business negotiations you should be looking the person in the eye are you counting like objects or any kind of objects in this category patterns like behind you there is a picture frame i like particular numbers like 10s and 20s so every frame is an easy 20. so my mind will do it over and over as i'm talking to you just like i have been doing the entire time we have been talking so each inner corner is 2 4 the outer corners are 6 8 the inner right pay attention to me what to me i'll show you pay attention to me well 40 16 18 20. you just do it over and over and over and over and over i just can't stop it i don't know what's going on yeah all right that is that's a little weird that's a little bit oh you want to hear even weirder when i go up and down stairs not only do i have to count them i have to count them in such a way that when i go down them my left foot lands at the bottom and lands on the number one and when i go up them my right foot must land at the top and land on the number 100 which means i have to guess what number and what foot to start on at the beginning of the stairs and you'd be counting by fives or sevens or tens i mean no no just one just by once you might not have a hundred steps because ten sticks below below 20 i'm nailing it if it's ten stairs i got it boom it's just i don't know what it is about my mind it's like oh it's up to a hundred is how you would be engaging like for example if i see 17 stairs or whatever i have to start on my right foot on the number 84 at the bottom and then go 85 86 788 that's when i get to the top 200 or 100 yeah yeah so good at it it's nuts see we have that in common i have to land on a prime number which is why i always take the elevator okay so so hakeem you know do i even dare share this with you so when i was a kid i thought of all the numbers that were just living in my head and i decided to write down every single number that had any meaning or significance to me at one sitting are you done yet no no at the time just not forever but still thank you forever so i wrote down every zip code that had any meaning to me i wrote down every phone number seven digit phone number that had any meaning every street address every uh the digits of pi yeah i also happen to know the fifth route of 100 to 12 decimal places that's down there and so it's a whole page just filled with numbers and but i don't i didn't view that as as compulsive it was just how many numbers am i carrying with me and is that necessary i think it was more of a practical exercise yeah and then i stood stepped back and looked at it and i said that's i think that's a lot of numbers but i i tried to make sure i it didn't grow so that i had room for other things in my brain but but this number thing there's some resonance there between us i just thought i'd put that out there you know there's even more i also had other kind of superpowers like you named that i no longer have like rotary phones i used to just amaze my family because i was like you dial this number because i could just tell from the sound of the phone right or if a car pulled up in the yard and it was a family member that's so-and-so just from the sound of the car right so the people around me were like oh this kid is a freaking kid absolutely and because my eyes are a weird color when i moved mississippi there were some several elderly people that was like that boy have devil eyes he's evil and they just treated me like crap yeah what a shame okay so let me ask you both this is so weird speaking of your childhood all right so like in your book you have these moments where you look to the stars and it has a profound effect on you where it causes you to go outside of yourself you know and i know neil when he was a kid had the same experiences yeah in the planetarium i was nine years old and the lights dimmed the stars came out and that's oh that's that's it i was star struck ever since and i go out into the real sky when i finally saw a real sky because i grew up in new york city and i look up at the stars and i just place them in the full three-dimensionality of the universe and and for my whole life to this day anytime i'm alone out under the stars but i have to be alone if i'm alone i want to be abducted by aliens i want a beam of light to come down and zap me back to some other planet and i want to meet the aliens oh you shouldn't do that i would have made a call is there something now with all of your experience exposure and knowledge of the universe is there something now that gives you that same experience in your work in your work or in your admiration of the universe or anything that puts you in that same wonder of i see the night sky in 3d oh my god kind of out of body kind of like this this is why i'm this is why i'm here like is there something now that happens absolutely sometimes you have these insights right that that aren't really insights but just like oh that's really interesting so for me data does it and so the data that did that for me a year ago was a visualization created from sloan digital sky survey data done by lawrence berkley laboratory so we say things like oh there's two million or two trillion galaxies in the observable universe and we show these slices of the universe but when you see a 3d representation you can look around the universe you see what the galaxies are but just to be clear when you project the full 3d universe on paper you take slices through it these are the slices you're referring to when you go to a full visual 3d representation no longer are slices necessary right just want to clarify that yeah is that the is that the baryon oscillating stereo coptics you've heard a lot of stuff survey well no no this is this is before that so this is before that yeah this is the this is the precursor to that basically in a way okay yes slowly disguise survey um but so here's okay but this is not your imagination it's not in 3d printing it's actually a 3d but it triggered my imagination because what do we do we teach students astronomy in order for them to understand the universe we say well you know things like this analogies the universe is the basic building block of the galaxy is the basic building block of the universe in much the same way that the cell is the basic building block of your body and i thought to myself well you know what let me take that to a to the limit let me take that seriously so what if i shrink myself down so small that the size of a human cell in respect to me is like the size of a galaxy with respect to me now right so that's like 20 orders of magnitude for the nerves out there so i did that and i was like what if i then study the universe from that perspective so say i'm in an elephant and i'm like oh i see these types of galaxies they're spirals they behave this way they're structured this way oh i see these they're ellipticals they behave this way they orient themselves this way now let me do the same thing in my analogy i'm an elephant oh i see a nerve cell these things behave this way they distribute this way blood cells bone cells muscle cells do you have any freaking idea what an elephant is okay so what you're saying is so okay so you you are um who's the woman who drives the bus that can go any size the magic school bus you you you're on the magic school bus at all times at all times at all times wow that's pretty wild though man that's a it's a great analogy i love it yeah yeah yeah it's it's a change of perspective it is let me give you another change of perspective right because us scientists we always like to talk about like how everything is just all space like oh you know how long does it take a light raid you know that you know that uh visualization on the internet where in real time we're going to travel through it shows that this is the travel of the beam of light yeah it's a brilliant a completely brilliant visualization i tweeted it everybody's wondering oh so someone shows the actual beam of an actual beam of light well i mean the video of a beam of light moving from earth to the moon and it takes about one and a half seconds so you see it take one and a half seconds then you see a beam of light from like from the sun to the earth that takes eight minutes and 20 seconds so you wait there for the eight minutes so and watch you say damn that light is slow right right yeah yeah so so in your in your phd uh you quote um ibm al haytham we spent a bit of time on him in cosmos so why don't you remind everybody who he is he is i i consider him the first uh practitioner of the scientific method he's the guy who showed that the eye is a passive receptor it does not send out a beam and bounce back and when isaac newton your favorite sciences i've heard my boy if i if i have seen father than others it's because i've stood on the shoulders of giants evan al hayden was one of the people he was speaking of because his book of optics as a scientific treatise in history around the turn of the century 1000 just changed everything right so this is in the golden age of islam back between like hundred and eleven hundred uh a.d so so there's a quote here which is it's the it's it's got it all in it you will you allow me to read it if please please okay everyone loves to hear you okay so just a reminder even al haytham was a mathematician and astronomer and and basically credited with the first formulation of the scientific method which would take probably another 600 years to become widespread use but he landed there first and if learning the truth is the scientist's goal then he must make himself an enemy of all that he reads he should also suspect himself so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency wow there in two sentences is the fundamental seeds of the scientific ones yeah there you go and you see his and his uh statement about ptolemy is is amazing as well yeah for a man to imagine an arrangement in the heavens does not make an existence okay no that's good yeah i like the first one better very good let me we got like a couple minutes left here so so so tell me you you were born james plummer jr that's right and now you now you pulled the african card so where did that come from and why you know what so the first thing the seeds of it started when i read my very first novel which happened to be the book roots uh everybody was talking about it you know i didn't have any love for adult books at the age of nine right uh and so i'm sitting around the farm bored as i don't know what i'm like let me give this thing a read and i got stuck i mean i could not put it down but when he got captured that was the first thing that just got me in the heart when kunta kente got captured i captured right uh then the second one was the the the the you've been wait wait and you've been a a um star trek next generation fan ever since right i was thinking of him i didn't know whether or not i should say so okay remind us who played kunta kinte lavar burton lavrar burton who when i met him was the one of the very few times i've ever been start star struck and he bought me my very first gen vodka tonic so wow okay all right that's in 2015 in 2015. yeah okay all right that's pretty cool man all right so so keep going so now you're you're in in roots now so now what yeah so uh then the thing that just kills me man is when they forced him to change his name right and so that just planted a seed in my mind right and so as i'm developing uh you know believe it or not this really isn't in the book but so what happens is you know how you make these connections by the time i'm out of the navy and i'm in college i start making these connections about the society in which we live and all the way it works against you know the way it maintains the hierarchy the social economic hierarchy we have right yes implicitly and explicitly and legally and de facto and du jour there's a hierarchy so you know how you sit around your dorm room listening to music and other things so i would uh you know start talking about this stuff and the group of people grew and grew and grew so we had to take it to the dorm and everybody's like oh you're a prophet and then these cats from the nation of islam showed up and i was like this is over i am not doing this anymore it's gotten too serious but you know i was just like making all these connections you know of what's going on but that did that just to remind people the nation of islam is the branch of islam that is based in the united states of america that's right medicine is there any more description of that that i have to give well it's not really a branch of standard islam it's sort of a new religion that was founded by elijah muhammad where he completely a coincident with malcolm okay yeah yeah so go on mm-hmm yeah so uh what was the question again yeah sorry your name changed how did that how did that lead to your name change yeah so when i get to stanford right i feel like there are certain things i need to know um this is stanford a graduate school in physics graduate school in physics right yeah so i had this buddy because i was you know what they called afrocentric at the time who always was encouraging me to read certain literature and i never would when i got to stanford i was like blackness help where are you and then you know i found it in the library and so i started defying just devouring and i had certain questions in my head for one thing i want to know the political structure i wanted you to be able to tell me a year and i'll tell you who the major nations in the world were at that time and what was happening in africa at that time i wanted to stay in african religions i wanted to understand everything right and so historically i'm a huge history buff all the way back to the big bang and so what happened is i realized you know okay i'm doing well in school stuff like this matters i feel like i've become a new person i've let go the old guy you know i'm now the the man and i was reborn in a way so i said here's what i want i want my middle name to express who i am i want my first name to express who i am who i wish to become and i want my last name to honor my african ancestors and the reason that's why i identified with right and so my middle name muata is swahili and it means he seeks the truth my first name hakeem most people know it from the muslim connotation but actually it's all over the easter near east and africa and it always means the same thing some form of wise and my last name oh luchay means god has done this i want it it's yoruba because on my mother's side of the family our uh you know we have family gatherings they were proud of always saying we were not slaves we were not slaves and frankly until the actual research was done and put in my face in the 90s i'd never believed that i was like then how the hell did we get here then we're black right um but it was true uh and so uh my ancestors this no it was the black settlers it was the black settlers that came across the bering strait they went from the lost tribe of the bearing strike well you know i did you know you read roger what's his name roger a somebody who's like everybody in history was black this guy was black that guy was black right beethoven's black so um what was i saying so so uh oh shade they came from he came from europa land went to france went to san to domingo had a son my great-grand great great grandfather and then moved to uh new orleans where so this is my great great great grandfather and my mother's great-great-grandfather right yeah that's it all right so this is your balloon rebirth here absolutely this is this this isn't so you are a person you changed your name because when you went to stanford and your book none of the white people would help you with your projects and you after you had helped them and so you like you know what i'm gonna make these people as uncomfortable as possible yeah my name is hakeem now okay no it wasn't that that was i did do that my early years i wasn't one of the few research groups that had a stereo in there and they were known for that being so cool they have a stereo in the student offices dude one day i went down there i put on chuck d america's most follow excuse me not chuck b ice cube america's most followed by ice cube kill at will follow my ice cube death certificate but later i learned that we are all medically sent back to jail at that point but you know i learned that we're all individuals so i don't even say white people black people like that anymore because you know i'll tell people i'm lucky i've been abused by white cops and black cops i've been held at gunpoint by black dogs and white thugs you know i realize that you know there is a identity hierarchy in our country right and one of the things that happens is you leave america you have the sense of right because you don't feel it anymore you don't feel that depression anymore it's a weight lifted it's a it's a fascinating phenomenon yeah i don't have that i don't have that problem i look down on everyone so well you know one of the psychological games i play like when i'm drawing going across driving across the part of the country where it's worse than others is i pretend i'm in another country because then i don't know what your assumptions and thoughts are right i don't know what your morays are in your countries so i'm free yeah but they'll let you know real fast hey i'll tell you a funny story like that what i was thinking you ain't from around here now from these parts when i came back to astronomy i was at uc berkeley and among the group of people i was in we saw a pearl mudder in those cats and and what they you know my blackness for the first time wasn't this issue so i was sitting in a talk and i was like oh my god i forgot i was black right then right right i left that position and became a professor in northern alabama and they were like oh no no no no no you're black wow so guys we got to land this plane so let me uh so so this this was quite the journey like i said you you should write a book oh you did write a book okay that's right a quantum life my unlikely journey from the streets to the stars and it's published in the the random house group right uh who is it penguin rent but who's that specific it's on the valentine imprint on the valentine imprint that's out this year yeah yeah so this sounds like a long overdue memoir based on all the stuff you were talking about now i wonder you know if all this is happening to you this is just your memoir part one because the rest of your life that's got to be worth another memoir i'm thinking oh it's absolutely it's even crazier i'm not abused for the first half of it you know it's because now i have agency now i'm the guy who can make a difference in other people's lives right yeah so that'll be how all that got turned into something where you do some good for the rest of the world and for the frontier the moving frontier of physics so uh i'm liking it dude thank you listen thanks for being a guest on star talk and will you invite us to the uh the the hollywood premiere of the biopic on yeah because you know they're going to make they got to make this into a movie now no i guess we haven't heard i guess you haven't heard so we have not oh so uh after i got the book deal i went to hollywood i met with several production companies my last meeting was with a man named chadwick boseman and his partner logan coles um and he took this on and he when he passed away he had 10 projects and logan told me that my our project together was the only one where it wasn't resting on the fact that he was a um an actor in it he was purely directing and we met a week before he was giving the commencement address at howard and i was being awarded an honorary doctorate at tougaloo right and so we talked about this and he championed my story and universal signed it on the first pitch and we signed a movie deal two years ago wow already all right so chadwick's death has changed things yeah okay well don't worry because it's a great story it's still good yeah somebody will pick up somebody and somebody will be this you should not need chadwick boseman to get made i'm pretty sure about that and just make sure michael b jordan plays you man because then you know it's guaranteed success yeah and i'll just just so you know the similarity between my childhood abs and michael's current abs [Music] [Laughter] i got six pack abs too they're just under four inches of fat right they're there i promise you all right guys uh so listen uh thank you hakeem for agreeing to this interview and good luck with the book tour and you got good backing behind that of random houses in the equation so hope to see you on the best seller list and uh well and i'm waiting for my ticket to your the premiere and and uh chuck agreed that um michael jordan's got to play play you okay in this role so that'll happen all right uh chuck always good to have you here always a pleasure this has been star talk radio an exclusive interview with hakeem oluseyi who is a fellow astrophysicist a meeting really here for the first time and who has a remarkable life captured in his memoir which comes out this june okay so uh this has been star talk i've been neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking up [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 98,163

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: 4VwzuBhPrFw

Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021