ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Physics
208
Herman White - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Childhood Interest in Science: My interest in science was: I cannot remember when I wasn’t interested
in science. And of course, now I call it science, but I think certainly when I was growing up, it was just
curiosity. My concern was really answering some very basic questions. I go back and give my parents a great
deal of credit for tolerating some of my eccentricities. I would always try to mix things up in my mother’s
kitchen, and I learned how to clean the kitchen very well as a result of that mixing up experiments. But I was
given a great deal of latitude to try to explore and understand in fact how nature worked around me. I recall actually
being in the woods next to my house, [and] fi nding the bottom part of one of these old Coca-Cola bottles.
And this effectively turns out to be a lens because these were thick pieces of glass, and it was fascinating to me
that I could actually use this thick piece of glass to essentially focus down the rays of the sun and start, I’m not
a pyrotechnic person, but focus down the sun’s rays and cause a little heat combustion with some leaves. And
that was very fascinating to me. I could not understand how it would be possible to do that, and I could put my
hand, not at the focus, but put my hand underneath this lens and nothing would happen to it. But there would
be enough heat concentrated at the focal point to actually cause combustion. And I think this sort of thing was
sort of the basis by which I actually started to study and to think about how things really work, why the sky
is the color it is, why the stars look the way they do. And of course in Alabama in the early 1950’s, you could
actually see the sky rather clearly, you didn’t have as much pollution and that sort of thing, light pollution or
any other type of pollution. So it was very, very fascinating for me to be able to put these things together to see
in fact the environment that I lived in, and also to understand something about the science that would probably
answer some of these questions. And I had a great deal of, how do I put it, I had a great deal of support with
regard to the community as well. Tuskegee, Alabama is a real signifi cant place with regard to education activities,
certainly as a young person growing up there and having a university town, essentially where you could
go and talk to chemists or you could talk to physicists, or you could talk to people who were aviation pioneers.
This was a very easy thing to do so it was, it seemed normal to me to be able to actually exercise some of the
resources that I had to be able to do things. And I really enjoyed that a great deal, I think once I started down
this path of asking these questions and being able to do little small experiments and so forth, I think that sort of
provided the, at least the direction, at some level the motivation as well, to continue to do scientifi c work.
Clip 2 - Legacy of Civil Rights Movement: The Civil Rights Movement was something I think that did provide
an opportunity for us. I mean, I thought certainly when I was high school student, or prior to high school
student, that various people would come to our house and my mother’s friends from the institutes and say they
couldn’t wait to have your son in their class. And the reason being, of course, was that I knew all about the
university and they knew all about the students who were coming out of the high school. So it was sort of a fait
accompli that I would be expected to fi nish high school and go to the hometown college. When I chose to go
somewhere else, that was, I think, probably a signifi cant part of just doing the work but also a signifi cant part of
the times, the Civil Rights Movement and so forth. And you couldn’t quite say no. Those who wanted to leave
college, leave and go away to college as opposed to going to a hometown school, understood in fact what they
were doing. But also understood that not all the students who went away were successful. Some actually did not
do what they thought they would do, some did not quite, they weren’t quite successful in terms of dealing, not
only with their academic development, but with the fact that you did have a burden to carry with regard to civil
rights and the fact that you were really going to be the pioneer. It wasn’t the nice cocoon, highly trained African
American community that you grew up in. You were now the identifi ed one in a much larger community.
Clip 3 - Getting into Nuclear Physics: I had studied basically elementary physics. I’d studied electricity and
magnetism, mechanics, nuclear physics, modern physics, quantum mechanics, and we had various seminars
also within our physics curriculum. There were only seven physics students, seven physics majors in my class.
So there was a small group of people that pretty much did everything together. We had individuals who would
come as colloquium speakers. And they would talk about cosmic ray physics. They would talk about nuclear