David Appell reviews A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars by Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz
Hakeem Oluseyi found his way into professional physics unlike anyone you have ever known. Born James Plummer Jr, an African American in the deep south of the US, he grew up in some of the scariest urban neighbourhoods, such as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and Watts in Los Angeles. His parents separated when he was four years old; he lived with an itinerant mother who was either sad or angry and always had a job but couldn’t hold it. He was largely raised by his sister Bridgette, six years older.
Shipped out west at the age of 10 to stay with an aunt, he lived in nine different households in 16 months, few of which seemed to want or like him, and attended five different schools. Back in New Orleans, “bigger, meaner, harder”, he was smoking marijuana daily at the age of 13 and carried a gun for protection. In Oluseyi’s own words, he “lived like a feral animal”.
It was, and for far too many still is, a desperate world of dire poverty, drugs and crime that America has accepted and chosen to ignore.
And yet James Plummer Jr somehow found his way through this quagmire, earning a doctorate in physics from Stanford University in California. It was after this that he changed his name to Hakeem Muata Oluseyi to honour his African ancestors. He went on to teach astrophysics and cosmology at, among others, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, and from 2016 to 2019 was the space science education lead in NASA’s Space Mission Directorate. Now 54, he was last August named Visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University, and regularly appears in major media as a science communicator on topics such as the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
How did Oluseyi manage this amazing transformation? In A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars, co-written with science writer Joshua Horwitz, Oluseyi tells the story of his life using the analogy of quantum tunnelling: “My life has been an oscillatory pattern of passing through walls.” All lives are ultimately mysteries, but Oluseyi’s is as improbable as any.
And yet some clear peaks stand out in his struggle. Naturally curious, he was born to seemingly ordinary parents, yet was gifted, with an IQ of 162. He eased anxiety by counting – anything and everything. At age six he learned bridge and was taking apart household appliances, which earned him whippings from his mother. In 1976, at the age of nine, Oluseyi read the novel Roots by Alex Haley, and says he was studying the equations of special relativity from 11 years old. In high school he won first prize for physics at the Mississippi state science fair with the project “Programming the Effects of Special Relativity”, but he only learned algebra after high school, during a bout in the US Navy.
One of the joys of reading this book is tracking the progression in Oluseyi’s life as key people enter and he tunnels through another barrier
One of the joys of reading this book, besides the authors’ excellent storytelling, is tracking the progression in Oluseyi’s life as key people enter and he tunnels through another barrier. His sister Bridgette kept him fed and safe. In elementary school a friend two years older, Darin Brown, was an inspiration, intellectual companion, protector from bullies and “the person who made me feel good about being smart”. Occasionally going to live in “backwoods Mississippi” with aunts, uncles and cousins, Oluseyi learned work habits that he says served as a training ground for life as a research scientist. He excelled at the tuba.
But when he joined all-Black Tougaloo College in Mississippi, after leaving the navy, Oluseyi was underprepared for the work required. He sold pot on campus supplied by his dad, and spent days holed up in his dorm room smoking crack cocaine. He had a disabled son with a woman who ultimately rejected him, but later began a new relationship with a woman who is now his wife.
After dropping out and working as a janitor for some months, Oluseyi re-enrolled with a new attitude, improved his grades, double-majored in physics and mathematics, and was accepted to graduate school at Stanford University as a diversity admission. There, he was required to take two years of undergraduate physics before any graduate classes. Yet drugs still haunted Oluseyi on all-night ventures out with friends, and he ultimately failed his graduate school qualifying exams, twice. He was allowed to stay only because his research group adviser, the solar physicist Art Walker, wanted him to.
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Finally, out again late one night, he was robbed and had a gun held to his head by a 14-year-old thug, but the chamber was apparently empty when the trigger was pulled. Terrified, Oluseyi confessed to Walker and to his wife, and finally changed his ways. He went on to become Walker’s senior research assistant, co-authoring several papers on solar physics and earning his PhD in his early 30s.
There’s no doubt Oluseyi’s life’s narrative is intriguing and even mesmerizing. I was readily pulled through this well-written book, with its short chapters, one per story. At many points I wanted to grab the young Oluseyi and shake him and point him in the right direction, so stark and shocking were his mistakes. I found myself invested in his character and, just when I’d get my hopes up, he’d disappoint with another drug binge or failed exam, only to come back ready to try again.
Like Oluseyi, this book succeeds in its arc: an exceptionally candid and gripping portrayal of a remarkable life.
- 2021 Ballantine Books, Penguin Random House $28hb 368pp
