Belizean scientist profiled on U.S. television network

He is a world class scientist who has made the improvement of his native land’s educational system a top personal priority. And while viewers in Belize have become well acquainted with Dr. Arlie Petters, beginning last night an audience of three hundred million people in the United States also got to know him. The vehicle is the television show Nova Science, which made its debut Tuesday on the P.B.S. network. Here’s the segment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Narrator
Hey, that’s me back when I was in graduate school at an astrophysics 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…

Dr. Arlie Petters
“So you must put them back so they could grow big, right, the way you can grow big.”

To the ministers—and I don’t mean clergy, I am talking about the Minister of Education…

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
“We are very, very proud of Dr. Petters.”

… And the Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Said Musa
“He represents in my mind what a Belizean can do.”

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’s always had an intimate relationship with light.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“Light is the great messenger, travelling billions and billions of light years, carrying secrets.”

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.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“I 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 in fact a lot like gravitational lensing is the surface of a pool. Light, if you have ever looked on a light, 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.”

Dr. Arlie Petters
“The word caustic means burning bright. If you look in your coffee cup, you’re gonna see one of the most common examples of caustics where you have two arcs that abut each other into a sharp point called a caust.”

David Spergel
“The same thing happens on a cosmological scale. Let’s say you are looking at a distant galaxy and light from that galaxy has to pass through other galaxies, through clusters.”

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.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“One of the deep mysteries about our universe is that about ninety-six 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.”

Arlie boldly went where no mathematician has gone before, he devised a single mathematical formula that could reliable 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.

David Spergel
“We could then think of gravitational lensing as a map indeed.”

Arlie’s pioneering work has won him many awards and he has received great notice right here on planet earth. He is the first African-American to earn tenure in the Math Department at Duke University.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“We have a very long way to go. In mathematics, for example, you have, on average, about just one percent of Ph.D.s going to African-Americans. Each year, each year and that is dismal.”

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 can count the telephones in his neighbourhood on one hand, yet six year old Arlie carried around a makeshift briefcase.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“I got a lot of pleasure just studying for hours and hours.”

Bernice Waight, Arlie’s Grandmother
“Sometimes I have to tell him to go out and play with the other boys. He would go out for a few minutes and come right back.”

When he was a teenager his mother summoned him live with her in Brooklyn.

Dr. 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.”

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 at the doorstep of Jim Wyche, head of a minority fellowship programme.

Jim Wyche, Hunter College (1980-1990)
“And before I could get the key in, he jumped up out of obviously a dead sleep and very groggily he said to me, you Dr. Wyche and I said, yes I am.”

Dr. Arlie Petters
“And I told him my situation.”

Jim Wyche
“It was very clear he’d done some research.”

Dr. Arlie Petters
“And I said, you know I would give you my transcript and I tell you this, I will not let you down.”

Time and again, Arlie Petters has defied gravity.

Dr. Arlie Petters
“It must have been within a couple weeks of so, Jim said you have the scholarship. And he said not only that, we are making arrangements for you into move into Hunter College dorms and I couldn’t believe it, it was like a miracle, yeah.”

Arlie made the best of the help he received, he graduated from Hunter College. This is celebration dinner.

He went on to MIT and then taught at Princeton University before arriving at Duke.

Dr. 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 view of people that are struggling.”

These days Arlie is trying to fulfil what may be his greatest vision of all. He’s 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 S.U.V.s, Arlie has created the Petters Research Institute, a place where kids from all over the country—kids like Arlie—can come to excel in maths and science and life.

Dr. 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.”

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.

Students
“I am just glad that he actually recognised the country that he came from.”

“One day I would like to be like him and try to give back to my community.”

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.

Prime Minister 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.”

Belize has put a lot of hope in the quite kid from Dangriga who made it, then made it back.

Dr. 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 have accomplished to have that spark go off in the child, those are the things that I am most proud of.”

To see if your cable system carries P.B.S. check with your operator. You can also visit the P.B.S. Nova Science Now website for additional material on Dr. Petters.