Margaret Harris: Harris' Intellectual Adventure Went Far

Physics major Margaret Harris has experimented with the coldest atoms in the universe and the hottest; tinkered in a cluttered physics lab and sung in the choir beneath the soaring arches of Duke Chapel; studied the ancient era of the Crusades and the futuristic realm of thermonuclear fusion. And her academic career has taken her from the scorching deserts of New Mexico to the bracing windswept coast of Scotland.

Sporting her trademark jaunty cap, Harris has certainly made her undergraduate years a time of expansive, and intensive, exploration. For example, for her senior thesis work under physics professor John Thomas, she designed and built a 30-pound instrument that generates a magnetic field 2,000 times that of the earth. The wire-festooned device aims to slow high-velocity lithium atoms to be captured and studied as part of Thomas's "quantum optics" research on matter at supercold temperatures.

When Harris arrived at Duke from her home in Kansas, she brought budding interests in physics and journalism, as well as a commitment to her Methodist religion. "I got lots of 'Dorothy' jokes," she recalls of her early days at Duke. But she also educated her urban friends about some of the unique aspects of semi-rural life.

"I remember during my freshman year trying to explain septic tanks to somebody who lived their entire life in New York City," said Harris. "And she couldn't believe that it was completely sanitary to just pump it into a tank in your backyard. I could not convince her that we didn't have just raw sewage boiling over in the back of my yard!"

Much as she had helped broaden her classmates' education, Harris also found Duke faculty ready to help her.

"A pleasant surprise was how easy and willing professors are to talk with students and discuss research and get involved and help out," she said. "All my professors except one at Duke have known my name -- and that one had a lecture class of 300, so I can understand that."

In fact, one teacher in her FOCUS program in physics persuaded her to major in the subject, and she eagerly launched an exploration of the fascinating world of high-energy atoms and photons. She also began a four-year career as a soprano in the Duke Chapel chorus, establishing a personal axis that would last her time at Duke.

"I have two favorite buildings on campus," she said. "One is the chapel; the other is the physics building."

During her freshman year, talks by a visiting physicist from the University of Colorado at Boulder piqued her interest in research there on strange clusters of low-temperature atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates. In turn, Harris piqued the scientist's interest.

"I asked him a question in a lecture," recalled Harris. "It was apparently a really good question -- but I didn't know that at the time -- and he mistook me for a graduate student and basically hired me on the spot to work for the summer."

During her junior year, Harris broadened her horizons even more when she spent a semester abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Lectures by leading scholars on the age of the Crusades -- amidst university buildings dating to that era -- inspired her to take a minor in Medieval Renaissance studies. Her experience also immersed her in a different, sometimes boisterous, intellectual culture.

"I got really involved in the debating society," she said. "They would bring in members of Parliament and university experts to debate, for example, on terrorism. And afterwards everybody would go to the pub, including the members of Parliament, and have a party. They would debate at the pub about such things as whether the sun had set on the British Empire. And of course they were quite drunk by that point, and so it was really hilarious.

"But it was also something of an intellectual experience, because it actually integrated social life and intellectual life a lot better than at Duke," she said.

The summer after her junior year found Harris involved in experiments at the other end of the temperature range from her previous low-temperature studies. She worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in a thermonuclear fusion power project -- which aims to harness the superhot energy-producing process of the sun.

Throughout her Duke career, Harris also worked as a science writer for the Office of News and Communications -- producing magazine articles and news releases on Duke research.

She believes her communications background will come in handy when she enters graduate school next year at the University of Durham in England. Besides doing physics research in "quantum computing" -- the development of atomic-scale computing technology -- she also plans to develop science presentations for area school children.

So what do her parents think of the far-flung travels and intellectual ambitions of their physicist-journalist daughter?

"My mom cites the old rhyme that begins 'Monday's child is fair of face,'" said Harris. "In that rhyme, Thursday's child has far to go. I was born on a Thursday, so she says it's my birthright as a Thursday's child."