Neel Mojee

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, “a welcome reception for future time travelers,” a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible.

In 1959, 9-year-old Ronald McNair went to a public library in Lake City, South Carolina because he was looking for more advanced books on science. Ronald's older brother, Carl, describes what happened next: “So, as he was walking in there, all these folks were staring at him - because they were white folk only and they were looking at him and saying, you know, 'Who is this Negro? So, he politely positioned himself in line to check out his books. Well, this old librarian, she says, 'This library is not for coloreds.' He said, 'Well, I would like to check out these books.' She says, 'Young man, if you don't leave this library right now, I'm gonna call the police.' So he just propped himself up on the counter, and sat there, and said, 'I'll wait.'” Ronald McNair eventually went on to get a PhD in Physics from MIT and was one of the 7 astronauts onboard the space shuttle Challenger when it was destroyed in flight in 1986. He was only 35 years old. Today, the library that refused to lend him books is now named after him.