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earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in science from Fisk University, a historically black college in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. It was a good start, but the city of Memphis was in the South, the region of the country that was most hostile to blacks. Imes knew that he had to get the best education possible to excel in science and decided to attend a northern university to get his doctorate. He chose the University of Michigan, where he worked with many established and respected physicists and made a name for himself in the area of infrared spectroscopy . For his doctoral work at Michigan, Imes designed and built spectrometers, devices that detect light waves. The machines used infrared light (a type of light wave that is invisible to people, and that we feel as heat) to create high-resolution pictures. These pictures showed how mole- cules were moving in certain gases. Molecules can move in two ways: they can vibrate along the bonds that link their atoms, and they can rotate around their center of gravity. Research had already shown that the energy in vibrational movements came in specific amounts called quanta . Imes’s work would show that rotational movement also could be measured in quanta. These breakthroughs were important to quantum theo- ry, which was relatively new at the time. Even though there were established laws of physics, they did not always ex- plain everything that scientists observed. Scientists won- dered if quantum theory could explain physical occurrences that did not make sense using the laws of classical physics.

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Black Achievement in Science: Physics