Hakeem Oluseyi - A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars

S ome years back, a magazine profiled my transformation from James Plummer Jr., a nerdy kid from some of Americas most deeply scarred urban ghettos, to Hakeem Oluseyi, sole Black physicist inside the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. The article ran with the tagline The Gangsta Physicist. The handle stuck, and it followed me wherever I went. I understood that it was an eye-catching tag, that it could open doors and young minds that my science degrees alone could not. But over time I grew to resent it. Gangsta Physicist didnt describe the totality of who I was, how far I traveled, or how hard I worked to get there.

As a bookish kid, I was an easy target in Watts, Houstons Third Ward, and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. My gangbanger older cousins taught me the rules of the street by the time I was six: who you could look at in the eyes and who you couldnt, how to tell if the dude walking toward you was Crip or Blood, friend or foe. I developed a sixth sense, what I thought of as my dark vision, that let me see all the dirt in my hood: where a deal was going down and where the undercover heat was hiding. The scariest time was after sunset, when the predators came out in force.

I was intrigued by the wider universe, including the night sky. But I couldnt see many stars from the streets where I grew up, what with the big-city lights and the smog. And for the sake of my own survival, I didnt want to be caught staring off into space. Celestial navigation wasnt going to help me find my way home without getting beat up or shaken down. By my early teens, Id adopted a thug persona, walking and talking tough, carrying a gun for protection. But I never joined a gang, and no matter how hard Id tried to straddle the gangsta-nerd divide, I was still mostly a science geek play-acting a thug.

Looking back at my boyhood in the 1970s, I see a frightened child who lived like a feral animal, surviving day by day on hustle and hope. I had a different nickname in those days. They called me The Professor because by the time I was ten years old, I was reading every book I could get my hands on. If anyone had told me Id grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldnt have believed them. In my hood, that kind of daydreaming was more likely to get you jacked than help you find your next meal or a safe place to sleep indoors.

By any odds and most calculations, I should not be here writing this book. But here I am. Ive learned that no matter how unlikely, anything you imagine for yourself is within the realm of possibility. Its a proven fact of physics. In quantum mechanics, the most improbable of outcomes is called quantum tunneling. If you try to walk through a wall, in all likelihood the wall will win. But theres an infinitesimally small probability that you will find a pathway through the wall. My life has been an oscillating pattern of passing through walls, then walking into the next one and bouncing hard in the opposite direction. Im living proof that our lives are ruled by the laws of quantum, rather than deterministic, physics.

I dont believe in fate, whether written in the stars or anywhere else. I wasnt destined to find a path through the heaviest hoods in America to an elite career in astrophysics. It could have gone either way for me. At any of a dozen junctures in my life, I could have turned left or right, a gun could have gone off in my hand or in someone elses.

My youth traversed a multiverse of possibilities. In one universe, James Plummer Jr. got shot during a drug deal gone bad and died in the streets of Jackson, Mississippi. In another, nonparallel universe, he found his way to a PhD physics program, learned to design rocket-launched telescopes that could photograph the suns invisible light spectrum, and became Professor Hakeem Oluseyi.

None of those namesJames, Hakeem, Professor, Gangsta Physicistforetold my journey through the multiverse. But they remind me, like star trails across the night sky, of the limitless possibilities in this quantum life.

Washington, D.C., 2021