The Guyana Business Journal this week hosted a landmark webinar honouring Clarence Trotz, former Headmaster of Queen’s College of Guyana and one of the country’s most distinguished educators, who, at 92 years of age, continues to teach physics to students in need.
Mr. Trotz served as Headmaster of Queen’s College from 1974 to 1980, taught physics at the institution beginning in 1957, and has authored four volumes of the school’s institutional history. He is currently preparing a young man from Bartica for CAPE Unit 2 Physics examinations in May 2026 — volunteering his time via Microsoft Teams because no physics teacher is available in the region.
The conversation took a remarkable turn when Dr. Keith E. Wilson, a former student of Mr. Trotz at Queen’s College between 1963 and 1966, joined the program live from the United States. Dr. Wilson holds a PhD in physics and retired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he led the team that in December 1992 demonstrated — for the first time in human history — the propagation of a laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in flight, over a distance of 1.5 million kilometres. Dr. Wilson subsequently built NASA’s first and only optical communications telescope at Table Mountain, California, a facility currently used to receive transmissions from the Artemis spacecraft orbiting the Moon and to send signals to the Psyche spacecraft at a distance of 307 million miles — both world records.
Dr. Wilson credited Mr. Trotz directly with shaping his decision to pursue physics and the career that followed.
“The one that touched me most was physics,” Dr. Wilson said on air, “and it did so because you taught it.”
The program was hosted by Dr. Terrence Blackman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, and Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal. It was co-sponsored by STEM Guyana and supported by Metallica Commodities Corporation, Pebble Stream, Caribbean International Shipping Services, and MCCG USA.
Dr. Blackman has published a full account of the conversation as this week’s GBJ Webinar Report, titled “The Longest Beam: On Clarence Trotz, Keith Wilson, and the Human Capital We Keep Sending Away.”
“The chain from a classroom in Georgetown in the 1960s to the edge of our solar system is not rhetorical,” Dr. Blackman writes. “It is traceable. It is real. The question — the only question that matters for Guyana in this moment — is what we intend to do about it.”
The full essay is available at:
