Professor Jim Gates on starships, string theory, and why he came to Brown

My interest in science dates back to when I was 4 years old. Mom took me to a science fiction movie named Spaceways. What I took away from it was that science was a doorway to adventure and that you had the ability as an individual to shape the course of your life. In 1975 I learned about this new mathematical physics subject, supersymmetry. This mathematics was to me so beautiful and elegant and strange that I decided that would be what I wrote my PhD thesis on. So even though no one else at MIT could figure out that this subject was going to be important for over 40 years, I figured it out as a graduate student and set myself up to have a successful career. Brown was a place that I felt I could finish this fall and winter of my career. Part of my reasoning for coming to Brown was because I wanted to teach. I'm one of those professors that has always existed in the trenches, doing the research, doing the teaching - forty-seven years teaching. Freshman year I took 'Flat Earth to Quantum Uncertainty' with professor Gates. His passion and excitement was electric and I looked forward to his lectures every single week. Taking that class was the first step towards astrophysics as a whole for me and it really like opened up a whole new door that I didn't even know was waiting for me. Without an endowed chair I would not be at Brown. One of the missions that a great University charges its faculty with is research, basically the creation of new knowledge. So what an endowment allows is for people who have established some record of innovation over some period of time, to ask questions that require funding. But to expend those without the requirement of worrying about a mission that's externally imposed. So if you want minds that are going to ask questions unfettered, endowments among faculty is the gold standard. There are a couple of extraordinary questions in physics right now about the structure of the universe. One of them is why we here at all. It sounds like it's a piece of philosophy, but it's actually a physics question. And so answering these kinds of big questions about this place that we live in, that we call the universe, some of us find that just a joyful challenge.

Channel: Alumni & Friends - Brown University

Views: 5,752

Keywords: Brown, Brown U, Brown University, Ivy League, jim gates, sylvester james gates, theoretical physics, brown faculty, brown university professors

Id: RBSYK3dHdNY

Length: 2min 35sec (155 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019