Meet Mr. Wizard
For 56 years — and counting — Regents’ Professor Steven Manson has been a stalwart of GSU’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, uncovering the hidden movements of the tiniest particles.
Steven Manson has used his wizardry to explain atomic and molecular physics to students at Georgia State University — and to guide their research — since 1968. That’s 56 of his 83 years.
“When I joined the faculty at GSU there were three buildings on the entire campus,” Manson remembers. “One was Sparks Hall, and one was the library. Kell Hall is now torn down. We were called Georgia State College then. There was only one department with a Ph.D. program, for psychology, I think. I joined as the sixth person in the whole Physics Department.”
Manson and the Physics & Astronomy Department have come a long way.
He’s earned an international reputation for research primarily focused on the interaction of charged particles and electromagnetic radiation with atoms and ions. Manson does his investigations with pencil, paper and computer.
Scientists like Manson’s frequent collaborator, Stephen Southworth, senior physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, take over from there.
“Steve does theory, and I do the experiments,” Southworth says. “Steve’s theoretical work simulates and explains electronic motions in atoms induced by photoionization. Then I see if he got it right.”
The bare-bones Physics Department that Manson joined the year Richard Nixon won the presidency now boasts 30 esteemed faculty members, all Ph.Ds., and close to 100 graduate students.
While teaching for seven decades, Manson has authored or collaborated on more than 350 scientific papers in refereed journals and delivered more than 500 conference presentations. His projects have received funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, NASA, NATO and the U.S. Department of Energy. He’s collaborated with experimentalists and theorists in France, Ireland, England, Italy, Serbia, Israel, Uzbekistan, India, Turkey, Qatar, Brazil and Australia.
Thomas Gorczyca, a theoretical physicist who works at Western Michigan University, has coauthored with Manson some 30 articles in major journals.
“Steve is well known and highly regarded as an atomic physics expert,” Gorczyca says. “He always offers great insight into problems, identifying earlier work on a subject and often even knowing the particular researchers. He always seems to have a different perspective in thinking about problems, and he’s invaluable in suggesting new things to look at in our present work.
“Steve Manson is a treasure trove of knowledge about developments in atomic physics over the past 50 to 70 years.”
This physics wizard, like his university, had humble beginnings.
At Public School 128 in Brooklyn, N.Y., he first thought about pictures of distant stars he saw in books and magazines.
“There was no eureka moment, really,” Manson says. “I just started wondering how things work. How do stars work? If they are fiery objects, why don’t they burn out? I can say my scientific interest began with astronomy.”
His elementary school published a magazine called Highlights. A caption with Manson’s third-grade photo lists the occupation he wanted as a grown-up: Atomic Physics.
When Manson was 9, in the third grade, he went with a fourth-grade female friend to the library. He had already read all the astronomy books in the kids’ section, so he persuaded his friend to “create a diversion,” as he puts it. He then sneaked into the adult section “to get some real books.”
The community around also him proved plenty fascinating.
“A guy from my neighborhood was coming up with the Dodgers, a baseball player just getting good. His name was Sandy Koufax. I also had a friend on a floor above ours, and his best friend was a radio and TV personality we knew back then as Fat Zeiger, who later changed his name to Larry King. He did OK.”
After P.S. 128, Bensonhurst Junior High School and Lafayette High School, Manson enrolled in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, the oldest science and engineering school in the country. He earned his B.S. in physics in 1961, then stayed on an academic course, earning his master’s degree (1963) and his Ph.D. (1966) in physics from Columbia University. His study specializations sound otherworldly: “Attosecond Phenomena in Atoms and Molecules” and “Studies of Atoms Confined in Fullerenes,” among others.
A postdoctoral fellowship followed at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Md., where Manson studied atomic photoionization for two years under pioneers Ugo Fano and John Cooper. In Maryland he met a young woman from Alabama, Bettye Bonds Thompson, an anthropology student. They married in 1968, and Manson made his first trip to the Deep South.
Bettye had been born in Selma, in the Alabama Black Belt. Her dad contracted tuberculosis, and the family moved to Arizona when she was young to support his health. Still, Bettye had family to visit in Wilcox County, near Selma. When the chair of the Physics Department at GSU, Joe Hadley, offered Manson a post, Manson jumped at the chance to take work in Atlanta to be close to his wife’s family and found himself an assistant professor in a small but ambitious enterprise.
“We had no doctoral or master’s programs, so we had to fight for those,” Manson says. “There was a line of thinking that Physics would just be unnecessary duplication because of Georgia Tech. Still, we pushed, first setting up a master’s program for students at night. That’s really where we got started.”
He became an associate professor in 1971, a full professor in 1976, then a Regents’ Professor in 1984. The university honored him with the Arts & Sciences Alumni Distinguished Professor Award in 1977, the Golden Key Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 1985 and the University Alumni Distinguished Professor Award in 1986. In 2020, GSU hosted an all-out academic summit to celebrate his 50 years of work at the university.
As Manson’s career progressed, Bettye finished her undergrad study in anthropology at GSU, then went on to earn a law degree. The couple bought a nice home in Decatur, Ga., not far from GSU, and raised two boys, Jonathan Thompson Manson and his brother adopted from Vietnam, Andrew Hai Bonds Manson. Jonathan today works as an intellectual property lawyer, and Andrew works as a computer engineer.
“Dad can explain anything to me,” Jonathan says. “It’s like having Mr. Wizard around.”
Regents’ Professor Steven Manson stands along Peachtree Center Avenue, just off the Georgia State greenway, in front of the spot where Kell Hall once stood. Kell was one of Georgia State's three buildings when he began his tenure in the Physics Department in 1968.
Manson’s primary work may seem as mysterious to most readers as those photos of the stars first seemed to young Steve Manson in 1950s Brooklyn.
That was outer space. Manson works now in a much smaller space.
“Over the years, my collaborators and I have been deeply involved in developing the understanding of how ionizing electromagnetic radiation interacts with atoms, known as the photoelectric effect or photoionization,” Manson explains.
“Aside from being one of the basic processes of nature, photoionization is of importance in astrophysics, materials research, particle detectors, chemical analysis and X-ray technology, to name only a few areas. Since atoms are the building blocks of all macroscopic matter, this understanding is crucial to the situation in all macroscopic matter — solids, liquids, gasses and plasmas.”
Gorczyca cites what he feels has been Manson’s most consequential work.
“I believe it’s his elucidation, with the late Dr. Tony Starace, of the most general expression of the angular distribution of electrons emitted following atomic photoionization, and the use of angular momentum transfer algebra and the addition of relativistic effects.” (Photoelectron Angular Distributions: Energy Dependence for Subshells, AF Starace and ST Manson, Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 54, Issue 2, April 1982.)
There you have it. Easy as pi. Right?
In the sweep of a lifetime, much has changed: Manson. Georgia State. Even the understanding of physics.
What’s the most important change Manson has seen?
“The shortening of the time scale is the highlight,” he says immediately.
When Manson started his career, the smallest interval of time a physicist could use for what he or she measured was “microsecond” — a millionth of a second.
“Technology has so advanced,” Manson explains, “that right now we can talk about processes that happen in an attosecond — a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.
“People measure that!” Manson exclaims. “It’s the most astounding thing. I find it so amazing that we can look at the time scale for processes we once thought were instantaneous.”
He continues in a professorial voice.
“Why do I think this amazing thing is so important? Because if you can figure out how electrons are moving in atoms and molecules, you can control that movement. The implications for chemical reactions and so much else are just profound. In my lifetime, we’ve moved more or less from looking at the macrostructure of the atom to seeing what’s actually inside it.
“That’s the most amazing thing that’s happened in my career.”
Don’t assume that Manson is just another geeky scientist who can do the math but has trouble matching his socks.
He’s a wit, constantly cracking wise. “I once thought about a career as a stand-up comedian,” he confesses.
He also has hobbies and interests. Manson collects coins, especially U.S. pennies. He pores over genealogies by night. He’s traced his wife’s family back to a progenitor of Alfred the Great, king of the British Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899. His own Jewish roots reach back to Sephardic Jews in Toledo, in Spain and in Latvia.
The boy from Bensonhurst has a little culture, too. His son Jonathan once told Manson that the upcoming school play would be “The Pirates of Penzance,” a 19th-century comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan.
“Dad burst out singing a number, ‘Modern-Major General,’ from the production,” Jonathan says. Its lyrics include:
“I’m very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,
I’m the very model of a modern Major-General!”
Manson might have substituted “I’m the very model of a major molecular and atomic physicist.”
Or a wizard.
His professional colleagues, scientific collaborators, university fellows and many hundreds of students would offer a standing ovation of support in an attosecond.
Photos by Meg Buscema
