Herman B. White leaves his hometown of Tuskegee behind to pursue physics -- but his Alabama roots help him make a surprising connection later in his career.
Herman B. White, Jr. is a Senior Scientist having served Fermilab for over 43 years in leadership roles and research on nearly a dozen experiments covering, Neutrino, Muon, and Kaon physics and projects in accelerators and particle beams. For decades, he has worked to communicate important decisions about physical science research to the U. S. Congress, agencies in Washington and the world, including service on advisory panels for the Energy Department (HEPAP), National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Academies, the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, and APS. He was a Resident Research Associate in Nuclear Physics at Argonne National Laboratory for a period in 1971, a Sloan travel fellow at CERN during part of 1972, a University Fellow at Yale from 1976-78, and received his Ph.D. from Florida State University. Among his recognitions, for his contributions to Kaon Physics and the establishment of a new kind of interaction distinguishing matter from antimatter, he received the (APS), American Physical Society, Edward A. Bouchet Award in 2010. His life story recorded in 2006 by the HistoryMakers organization in Chicago, was made a part of the HistoryMakers Video Oral History Archives currently included in the USA Library of Congress permanent repository.
This story originally aired on August 24, 2018 in an episode titled “Leaving Home: Stories about the places we're from.”
Story Transcript
I've often wondered how you make decisions about doing new projects, that is things that you don’t know is going to work, things that may actually fail. And what arguments do you make to the decision makers who are not scientists about why they should support it? I have a little bit of experience in this.
It turns out that being able to actually talk about the science and how the science is used is equally important. This is important to me basically because I grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama, the Deep South. This will become important as I go on with this talk.
My parents grew up in rural Alabama, on farms, and settled in Tuskegee, a fairly famous city in the middle of Alabama where I grew up. My father served in World War II in the U.S. army and when he returned from Europe where he served during the war, he had an international perspective, a world perspective that I hadn’t seen in many people but I benefited from it as a result.
Tuskegee was an unusual place at that time as well and so science and the Tuskegee Airmen, if you remember them, were individuals who actually were trained in Tuskegee. So I was surrounded by essentially science and technology and the ability to do new things. I had a really good time actually as a high school student with the college and with many people who are relatively famous in terms of what they did.
Alabama at that time also was very important because of the testing of the Saturn V booster. This was the rocket that actually took people to the moon. So you can see that it was probably not unheard of that I would probably windup doing science for my career.
Nuclear science was new at that time so I decided that nuclear physics, actually nuclear engineering would be something that I should pursue. Let me point out also that Tuskegee was an interesting place also not only for how science was done but how it was actually used. We had science that was good enough and innovative enough to produce an atomic weapon that would stop a war, but we also had the legacy of the Tuskegee Experiment in which poor men in a segregated community were allowed to suffer untreated for a disease so that science could find out how that disease would actually ravish their bodies.
This is my basis for being able to make the case for science. I could say all the great things and the new things and the wonderful things that we actually get out of science and get out of our research, and that drove me into science, but my humanism is remembering what I actually learned from my hometown.
I left Tuskegee and went off to a number of universities and CERN Lab, as you heard, and various places around the country, and wound up at Fermilab, the highest energy accelerator in the world. It was wonderful.
I did a lot of nice experiments here, we made a lot of discoveries, made a lot of friends. Of course, it was extremely hard because we were doing things that you didn’t know what the outcome might be.
Many of us actually developed an ability to talk about science and to make science an important aspect of our lives and an important aspect of the world that we lived in. So every year, the agencies that supported our basic science, and let me just point out that applied science is usually supported not only by the people of the country but also by industries and companies. But basic science is usually not supported by companies, at least they used to but they don’t do that now.
I have the opportunity to join with some of my colleagues in going to Washington, DC, to make the case for science and every year we had maybe 300 or so meetings in the congress of the United States to get support for our science. And they made… I don't want to say it’s a mistake but they put me in charge of this at one point. They were lucky.
And I decided to change things. Of course when you get a new leader you always find things get changed. So I decided that we needed to not only see all the people in congress but we needed to see the congressional leaders, that is the individuals who were important for various committees that made decisions about science.
It turns out one notable visit that we had required us to go to the chairman of a committee, a very important man, who was a congressman from the first district of Alabama. There's some value in that, by the way. The great state of Alabama. So I decided that we were going to not only go to Washington to see this man but we were actually going to get in to see him.
Now, a district of the United States has about 700,000 people in it and so to see a congressperson themselves is somewhat rare because the priority is given to constituents and so, eventually, you just run out of time. But in my case, we decided that we should take all of the particle physicists in the first district of Alabama and bring them with us to our meeting. The people who were providing the resources for this trip were concerned. They actually wanted me not to do this because they didn’t think we were going to have enough resources and I convinced them that it was absolutely important that every one of the particle physicists in the first district of Alabama needed to come with us, and both of these persons actually agreed to do this. They were exceptional.
It turned out that the congressperson also felt this was important enough to actually have a briefing in his office before we went in. This had never happened to me before. So we’re waiting outside. There are three of us. He's being briefed by the people, his advisers from his district, and being briefed by the people who support him in the congressional committee that he chairs. This is the Appropriations Committee, a very serious business, they deal with money.
So we were ushered into the room and, of course, it’s crowded. There were a lot of faces looking at us now. My colleagues sit down and I do what’s now known as my stand-up routine in Washington and I start to talk about the great things that particle physics does for us, the great discoveries we've made, the possibilities of great things in the future.
And the congressman was frowning. Have you heard that term “I’m dying up here”? Well, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn’t doing very well, but eventually he stopped me and asked my colleagues where they were from and what they were doing there. They said, of course, we are from the district, we’re from the university and we, along with our students, actually engage in the science that Herman is talking about at a laboratory, a national laboratory in Illinois. Ah, he thought that’s interesting.
Then he turned to me again and looked and said, as he moved closer off of his seat, “Where are you from?” And for a millisecond, okay, it was two milliseconds, I started to say I was from Naperville, Illinois, which is a nice place to live, by the way. But I thought very carefully and said, no. I should tell him, which I did, “I’m from Macon County. You know, Tuskegee.”
He said, “Tuskegee? You're all from Alabama.”
I said, “Yeah.”
Then he turned and beamed a beautiful smile at me, which I really enjoyed, and said, “Well, why didn’t you say so? What can I do for you?” And with that declaration we had succeeded.
Two things happened. One, is that the congressman saw us and decided to support us, and two, an appropriator asked you what they can do for you. That’s very rare.
That congressman and I probably would never have crossed paths many years before that. The volatile ‘60s with all the civil rights and with social change and with wars was not a time in the South where you actually had communication between various groups of people. But I saw progress. I saw the ability for us to actually be in the same room. His formative years in Alabama were very different than mine but somehow, over thirty years or so, we found ourselves in the same room. And that meeting which really was a meeting about science and about physics stopped being a meeting about reporting on physics and turned into a meeting - to use the euphemism - of folks from down home.
And we actually stopped talking about physics for fifteen minutes. The 15-minute meeting we were supposed to have turned into forty minutes and we got a nickname. We were called the ‘Science Guys’. That’s really important because you're not doctor this or professor that. Everybody knows the science guys.
And I was very, very happy to be able to actually have done something like that. To succeed, in fact, making the case for our science with people who not only would understand that the science was good, that was an international and a national effort, but that people from his district, in the first district of Alabama and - that’s down by Mobile, by the way - were actually doing research in Illinois and that it was a national effort and that it was important. We succeeded in getting that support.
And I have to admit that when I talk to young people today and they ask me how do you make the case, I invite them not to follow the path that I took, to pioneer their new paths because things are different now than they were in the ‘60s and different now than they were in the ‘90s. But you cannot forget that past.
The humanism in which I understood something about doing science and about being able to make the case for the work that we do that we’re not sure is actually going to make any impact on the problems that we have now, but may very well may impact tremendously on the problems that we don’t know we have now. The things that we do in particle physics may actually be understood and applied fifty years from now. And actually I guess since I've been in Fermilab so long it’s almost approaching fifty years, I should be careful about making that statement.
But I am very pleased and very happy to be able to have developed those skills and very happy to be able to have had that experience. We’re now at a point at which there are lots of discussions that are being made and people are saying a number of things that are basically not true and it is time for us scientists, if there are scientists in the audience, to stand up, to speak the truth about what we actually know. These are our skills. We cannot let others determine what those skills are. This is what the congressman said to me. I certainly hope I stimulate some young people to replace me. Thank you very much.
Hear Herman’s story on Soundcloud.