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<div class="rich-text">(This video is no longer available for streaming.) How does a poor kid from Belize become one of the world's premier researchers in the esoteric field of gravitational lensing? Hard work and persistence help, as NOVA scienceNOW reports in this profile of Arlie Petters, Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Duke University.
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A boy from a rural village in Belize grows up to become a world-class mathematician and cosmologist.

<div class="rich-text">A boy from a rural village in Belize grows up to become a world-class mathematician and cosmologist.</div>

A boy from rural Belize becomes a world-class mathematician and cosmologist.

Profile: Arlie Petters

Space & Flight

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 Profile: Arlie Petters
</h3>

 PBS air date: July 24, 2007



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Hey, that's
me, back when I was in graduate school, at an astrophysics conference overseas.
And that's me as a smiley post-doc at Princeton University with one of my
buddies from the math department, Arlie Petters.


 Today,
Arlie is one of the world's leading experts in what happens to light
during its long journey across the universe. But Arlie's own journey to
becoming a scientist, although not quite as long, is just as interesting.


 When
Arlie Petters comes home to his native Belize everybody wants his attention,
from kids...



 ARLIE
PETTERS
 
 (Duke University)
 
 :
 
 So you must put them back so they could grow big,
right? The way you can grow big.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 ...to the
ministers. I don't mean clergy. I'm talking about the Minister of
Education...



 FRANCIS
FONSECA
 
 (Minister of Education, Belize): We're very, very proud of Dr. Petters.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 ...and the
Prime Minister.



 SAID MUSA
 
 (Prime Minister, Belize): He represents, in my mind, what a Belizean can do.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie is a national
hero. He never raises his voice or does anything to draw attention to himself;
he lets his ideas do all the talking.


 Born
and raised in the Caribbean sun, he has always had an intimate relationship
with light.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 Light is a great
messenger, traveling billions and billions of light years, carrying secrets.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie knows all
about long and arduous journeys. His began in Belize, but it took him to Duke
University, where he is a member of both the physics and math departments,
leading the way in the field of gravitational lensing.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 You could think of the
lens in my glasses as an example of a gravitational field, in that light passes
through it. It may get deflected, it may even be slowed down, and this impact
on the light ray comes under the fancy name, gravitational lensing.



 DAVID
SPERGEL
 
 (Princeton University)
 
 :
 
 A lens that has an effect a lot like gravitational
lensing is the surface of a pool. Light...if you've ever looked at a
nice, sunny day, at the bottom of a pool, what you see is light comes in, gets
deflected by the ripples on the pool and gets focused. We call that pattern
"caustics."



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 The word caustic means
burning bright. If you look in your coffee cup, you're going to see one
of the most common examples of caustics. Where you have two arcs that abut each
other into a sharp point called a cusp.



 DAVID
SPERGEL:
 
 The same thing happens on a
cosmological scale. Let's say you're looking at a distant galaxy.
And light from that galaxy has to pass through other galaxies, through
clusters.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 How that light
bends and careens through space tells us a lot about what we can't see,
and that's most of what's out there.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 One of the deep mysteries
about our universe is that about 96 percent of it, we don't really know
what it is.



 DAVID
SPERGEL:
 
 These gravitational lensing
effects tell us a great deal about the physics of the universe because instead
of telling us about what's going on with the light, we can see
what's going on with the matter.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie boldly went
where no mathematician had gone before. He devised a single mathematical
formula that could reliably measure how the gravity of many objects, such as
galaxies and black holes, shape light as it passes by. His calculation will
help astrophysicists determine the structure and environment of objects they
can't see.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 We could then think of
gravitational lensing as a map, indeed.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie's
pioneering work has won him many awards. And he's received great notice
right here on planet Earth. He's the first African-American to earn
tenure in the math department at Duke University.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 We have a very long way to
go. In mathematics for example, you have an average of about just one percent
of Ph.D.s going to African-Americans, each year, each year. And that is dismal.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 But Arlie understands
how circumstances can interfere with learning. He was born in the small Central
American country of Belize. He grew up poor in the city of Dangriga. You could
count the telephones in his neighborhood on one hand, yet 6-year-old Arlie
carried around a makeshift briefcase.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 I got a lot of pleasure
just studying for hours and hours.



 BERNICE
WAIGHT
 
 (Arlie Petters' Grandmother)
 
 :
 
 Sometimes I would have to tell him to go
out and do...play with the other boys. He would go out for a few moments
and come right back.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 When he was a
teenager, his mother summoned him to live with her in Brooklyn.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 That was quite a shock for
me. And the first thing you had to do was to get muscles. And you had to know
how to fight.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie began Hunter
College, but family friction left him without a home. Ready to give up and go
back to Belize, he made one last desperate attempt to stay in school. He showed
up on the doorstep of Jim Wyche, head of a minority fellowship program.



 JIM WYCHE
 
 (Hunter College, 1980–1990): And before I could get the key in, he jumped up out
of, obviously, a dead sleep and said to me, very groggily, he said, "Are
you Dr. Wyche?" I said, "Yes, sir, I am."



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 And I told him my
situation.



 JIM WYCHE:
 
 It was very clear that he had done some research.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 And I said, "I would
give you my transcript. And I tell you this: I will not let you down."



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Time and again,
Arlie Petters has defied gravity.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 It must have been within a
couple of weeks or so, Jim said, "You have the scholarship." And he
said, "Not only that, we are making arrangements for you to move into
Hunter College dorms."


 And
I couldn't believe it. It was like a miracle, yeah?



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Arlie made the best
of the help he received. He graduated from Hunter College. This is his
celebration dinner.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 We are the graduating
seniors.



 AUDIENCE AT
HUNTER COLLEGE GRADUATION:
 
 Yeah!



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 Dr. Wyche. Yeah!



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 He went on to MIT
and then taught at Princeton University, before arriving at Duke.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 You know, I was blessed to
have had many people help me along my path in life. And so, in a sense, I see
myself as playing the role of sharing with others the point of view of people
that are struggling.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 These days, Arlie
is trying to fulfill what may be his greatest vision of all. He has gone back
to Dangriga, where light and caustics are plenty, but resources can be thin.
Arlie has gone back to give back.


 Amidst
the wooden houses, on roads shared by ducks and SUVs, Arlie has created the
Petters Research Institute, a place where kids from all over the country, kids
like Arlie, can come to excel in math and science and life.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 It allows you to develop
thinking skills. It allows you to wonder about great things you want to do in
life, aspirations. And that was very special to me.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 He has created a
haven for them. It's a place where they don't have to worry about
creature comforts or meals, just equations.



 GIRL:
 
 I'm just glad that he actually recognized the
country he came from.



 BOY:
 
 He's trying to help out Belize.



 BOY:
 
 One day I'd like to be like him, and try to
give back to my community.



 NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 And he's helped to
develop a curriculum to improve math and science education across the entire
country, as Belize puts its hope in technology as an economic alternative to
tourism.



 SAID MUSA:
 
 Science
and technology is where it's at in the world of tomorrow. And we have to
get there. So the future is there for us. And Arlie represents that future.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON:
 
 Belize has put a
lot of hope in the quiet kid from Dangriga who made it, then made it back.



 ARLIE
PETTERS:
 
 If I can get a child to be
charged up and to believe in himself, to believe in herself, that they can do
great things in life...whenever I see that I've accomplished to have
that spark go off in a child, those are the things I am most proud of.


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