On 14 May, James Floyd crossed the stage at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, along with roughly 2200 other new graduates and collected his diploma. Floyd had recently turned 75—he was old enough to be his classmates’ grandfather—when he fulfilled his dream of earning a bachelor’s degree in physics.
His interest in science was sparked when he was around 6 years old. “I came into the kitchen from playing outside,” he recalls, and saw a picture of a mushroom cloud on a calendar. It showed the nuclear bomb exploding over Hiroshima. His mother explained that it was an atomic bomb, to which he responded that he needed to be “whatever person could do that.”
Floyd never wavered in his intention to study physics, but his path to the degree was circuitous. He finally went back to school when he was checking out Sam Houston for his grandson and ended up attending himself. Now that he has the degree—with close to a 3.5 GPA—he’s making plans to use it. “Physics is such a beautiful subject,” he says. “It teaches you to understand nature, and also it teaches you to be very logical.”
Floyd says he wishes he had gotten his physics degree when he was younger, but adds that he has led an “exciting life and wouldn’t trade it. Whatever I was doing, I did the best I could at the time.”
He took a break from studying for his final exams in computer science and linear algebra to talk to Physics Today.
PT: Can you tell us a bit about your early years?
FLOYD: I grew up in a small town in North Carolina called Badin. It was segregated, of course. It actually had a track. The whites were on one side of the track, and the Blacks were on the other. We did not treat each other badly; that was sort of unusual, but we didn’t. My people were mostly sharecroppers; they picked cotton and did other menial jobs in North Carolina. On my father’s side, they worked on peach plantations in Georgia with no chance of getting a decent education.
When I was a child, my great-grandmother Hanna would point out the Big Dipper to me. I believe her close ties to slavery were the reason for her obsession with stargazing—her parents had been slaves, and runaway slaves used the Big Dipper to find their way North. Because of her, I became fascinated with stars. Later, when I was in the US Navy, I often volunteered to help “shoot the stars”—that is, take the azimuth angle to find our position on the globe. We had satellite navigation—GPS—but it was so new that we used it as a secondary measurement.
Most of the men in Badin, including my stepfather, worked for an aluminum plant, Alcoa. It was the largest in the world at that time. My mother did domestic work. As a teenager, I would carry my science books everywhere I went, even to the barbershop, and would read them while waiting in line.
My mother used to say, “When you go to college . . .” So we kids didn’t know you didn’t have to go to college. All five of us have college degrees. And my mother got a degree in business at age 63.
In my hometown we were taught enough in school to overcome any challenges we might face. But the white schools were much better than ours. I found that out the hard way, when I went to high school for almost a year in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The principal called me into his office on my second or third day and told me that this high school was going to be very advanced compared to what I had been used to. He was absolutely right.
They did algebra; they were learning integrals. Back home, we didn’t. In the lab, there was a Bunsen burner; we never had those. We never used flasks. And the first time I heard of Ernest Rutherford was when I was there. We talked about his experiment—how he discovered that the atom has a small, massive, positively charged nucleus by firing alpha particles at a gold foil and looking at the angles they bounced off at.
I went to the school in Massachusetts because my grades were high. I had an aunt who lived there, and I went to stay with her. She was only four years older than me, and we didn’t get along. But I had to go home to North Carolina for other reasons. My time at school in Massachusetts was a great experience—it gave me exposure, and if you get exposure, you start to realize how much work you will have to put in to realize your dreams.
PT: What did you do after high school?
FLOYD: I joined the navy in 1964, at age 18. I went to radar school and ended up on an aircraft carrier from the Korean War era. On the aircraft carrier, I would go to the library and read. One day I pulled a book from the shelf, and it was about Albert Einstein. I read about his life and things he had done, nothing really technical. That is when I knew I wanted to be a physicist. While I was in the navy, we would be deployed to Vietnam for three to six months at a time. I took all the correspondence courses I could.
After I got out of the navy, in 1968, I went to college at Central State University, Ohio’s only public, historically Black university. I started studying physics. I was doing alright, but during that time I was fed the idea that there were no jobs for physicists. NASA had hired so many scientists and engineers during the Sputnik era, [and I heard] they had an overflow and were laying off scientists. I thought I wouldn’t get a job in physics. I finished up with a degree in marketing in 1978 from Wright State University in Celina, Ohio.
PT: From the timeline, it sounds like you must have been doing other things too.
FLOYD: I didn’t go to school full time. I sold real estate, and with a couple of friends I bought an aircraft and leased it. It was a Cessna 182. We made pretty good money. And I worked at the telephone company in communications. They called us apparatus men. Sometimes we traced calls for the FBI. At the time, we didn’t have electronic switching systems. To trace a call, you had to go to each bank of switches and put a ground on it. The ground would freeze a single digit. So you would get the whole phone number by going from switch to switch.
I also did a stint in law school. I came close to finishing it, but my grades were not great, and I realized law school was not my cup of tea. After that I came to Houston. I worked as a supervisor in a wastewater treatment plant. While I did that, I went to school and got an associate’s degree from Houston Community College in applied science.
PT: Did you use your science in the job?
FLOYD: Yes. And my employer paid for me to get the degree. We had a lab, and we tried to balance the microorganisms you need for wastewater treatment. For instance, you would want so many animals—rotifers—and so many plants and so many bacteria to treat the waste. The rotifers shred the waste and make it more efficient for the bacteria. And our odor control systems used chemistry.
In that job, I was also the one to talk to visitors—students from the University of Texas and delegates who visited from different countries.
PT: What brought you back to studying physics?
FLOYD: I retired from the City of Houston in 2000, when I was 55 years old. I started a trucking company. I had my old physics books from Central State University and newer books, like the fourth edition of Introduction to Electrodynamics by David Griffiths. I had a sleeper on my truck, and that’s where I studied. My plan was to finish my physics degree. That didn’t happen right away.
At the age of 71, I was trying to convince one of my grandchildren to go to college and take up environmental science. He had good grades. I went to Sam Houston State to get information, and I decided to go to the physics department. That’s when I met the chair, Dr [Joel] Walker. We were talking about my grandson, and I noticed he had a copy of Griffiths on his bookcase. I told him I’d read that book.
The conversation ended up with Dr Walker telling me that I needed to take physics boot camp, a class all physicists at Sam Houston take. He told me I could sit in on the class. I had to drive 40 miles each way, and I went every day. I did all the work and expected my papers to be graded. I audited that first class, and the next semester I enrolled for credit.
PT: What about your grandson?
FLOYD: At the time, he was flipping pizzas, and he is still doing those sorts of jobs. That’s the irony of it. I was going to go back to finish my physics degree eventually, but life had distractions. I needed to have Dr Walker invite me. That was one of the most beautiful things a man could do, I think.
PT: Do you have a favorite area of physics?
FLOYD: I took all the courses—modern physics, quantum physics, electronics, classical physics. I loved thermodynamics. I got credit for the courses I had taken at Houston Community College, but not for the physics classes I’d taken nearly 50 years earlier at Central State. And I still had to do some core courses—I picked dance and a sociology course, introduction to ethnic studies.
In an advanced physics course, we worked with data from the Large Hadron Collider. We looked at leptons and quarks—strange, charm, bottom, top.
My favorite area is dark matter. We know it exists because of the way galaxies behave. It’s fascinating to me. I hope to visit the LUX [Large Underground Xenon] dark-matter experiment in South Dakota someday. I am interested in the unanswered questions.
PT: What were some of the challenges to coming back after so much time, and being older than your classmates?
FLOYD: There were some embarrassing things. In a class early on, the professor said he would put the assignment on Blackboard. I was waiting for him to write it on the blackboard, and finally I asked him when he was going to do it—there was a blackboard behind me. He said that was a green board. I didn’t know about the program Blackboard. That’s the sort of thing that happens.
And in electronics, we made burglar alarms. You put your code in to turn it on or off, and it would call the police department. They actually worked. The professor wanted a photo, and everyone except me pulled out their phones to take a picture. I had a flip phone without a camera. Everybody laughed. You have to get used to computers and things. That was one challenge.
PT: Are you put off by programming and using computers?
FLOYD: I’m not put off at all because I have time. I took a Java course. Python would be more useful. After I graduate, I will study and fill in gaps. I’m not far behind, and I know what I need to do to get good at programming. That’s the way I am: If I don’t know it, I believe I can learn it.
PT: What about the age difference?
FLOYD: I wouldn’t hang out with the other students. They were very nice to me, but their conversations were a bit different from what a person my age wants to talk about. It would be awkward.
PT: Circling back to the mushroom cloud that inspired you, have your opinions about the bomb changed since you were a child?
FLOYD: I am glad you asked that question. I was talking to someone about what had inspired me, and she said, “So, you came into the world wanting to blow up something.” I had never thought of the morality of it as a kid, and I probably did want to blow things up. As a kid, you don’t see death. But physics is a moral thing, and I have changed my mind.
PT: What are your plans?
FLOYD: My age bothers me a bit. But I don’t want to let that get in the way of me trying to pursue my dreams, trying to do something in the world. Even motivating people is a good thing—if I do no more than that, I’ll know I have done something valuable. But I want to do a little bit more with my degree.
One possibility is teaching. I’ve heard about a program that would pay for graduate school for a master’s in physics while I teach. Pay me to sit in class—that’s just heaven to me!
And I’d actually like to work on a physics project if I could. Especially an experiment in dark matter. I know they have top-of-the-line physicists, but I’d like to contribute.
PT: Do you have advice for others?
FLOYD: I would tell young people, or old people, and particularly people my age: Don’t think it’s over because you are older. You still have life to live, and you should enjoy it right to the very end.
