Much of the praise for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein\u2019s debut book in 2021, \u201cThe Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred,\u201d lauded the way she used personal experiences in physics to discuss the social and political inequities that exist alongside scientific breakthroughs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt contains the narrative of dreams deferred,\u201d Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, explained in April at a bookstore in Chicago. But its very existence, she said, also \u201crepresented a dream deferred, because that was not the dream of what my first book was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her second book reclaims that dream. Released on April 7, \u201cThe Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie<\/a>\u201d is less pain and more play, a homage to the big questions that made Dr. Prescod-Weinstein want to become a physicist in the first place. She begins the book by asserting that it is humanity\u2019s duty to uncover and share the story of our universe. Her latest offering toward that duty is a journey through physics that is tightly bound to her own cultural roots.<\/p>\n In the midst of a multicity book tour, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein spoke with The New York Times about guiding readers through the cosmos from her own point of view and about some of the art, poetry and literature she drew on to shape that journey. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n Why include so many references to poetry in a book about physics?<\/strong><\/p>\n I knew poetry before I knew physics. It was part of my upbringing. I loved A.A. Milne\u2019s \u201cNow We Are Six\u201d and Edward Lear\u2019s \u201cNonsense Limericks.\u201d Both of my books draw their subtitles from Langston Hughes\u2019s \u201cMontage of a Dream Deferred.\u201d<\/p>\n Adrienne Rich\u2019s poem \u201cThe Burning of Paper Instead of Children<\/a>\u201d became a guiding light for how my work would move in the world. It also opened up for me that I need language. That\u2019s true among physicists. Even an equation is a sentence; even an equation is telling a story.<\/p>\n As physicists, we\u2019re always working in language to connect what we learn with what we know. Poetry is one of the first places that my brain goes to draw those links. Language, as it moves in my brain, is often in Hughes and Rich and Shakespeare. Those are the lines that flicker up for me.<\/p>\n What if we got away from the argument that doing cosmology and particle physics is practical or materially valuable? Then we have to accept that we\u2019re like the poets. What we do is important culturally in the same way poetry is. A piece of this book is me saying there is value in banding with the poets, and fighting for the value of being curious and trying to articulate the world with whatever tools are available to us. Not for the purposes of selling something, but for the purpose of fulfilling our humanity.<\/p>\n Another theme throughout the book is the story of Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice and her adventures in Wonderland.<\/strong><\/p>\n Being a science adviser on future installments in The Legendborn Cycle, a fantasy series written by Tracy Deonn, is one reason Alice is in my book. It has allowed me to be open to the playful side that physics, as a Black queer person, can take from you. I wanted the book to be whimsical, because that\u2019s who I was when I first arrived in physics, and that\u2019s who I want to be when I die.<\/p>\n Part of the call of quantum physics is to change what our sense and sensibility are. When you look at the world through this framework \u2014 like the idea that particles have spin but don\u2019t really spin \u2014 it sounds like nonsense. Except that\u2019s literally how the universe works. Physics is our \u201cthrough the looking glass.\u201d It\u2019s real.<\/p>\n Your first chapter invites readers to reflect on the metaphors used to describe the universe, like the \u201cfabric\u201d of space-time or electromagnetic \u201cfields.\u201d Why open in this way?<\/strong><\/p>\n A lot of books about quantum physics start with its history. I wanted as much as possible not to just do that. I had actually planned to start it with the Stern-Gerlach experiment of 1922<\/a>. But then I read an essay<\/a> by the poet Natasha Trethewey about abiding metaphors and started to ask myself what the abiding metaphors of my physics training were.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t ever take time in our classes to ask, \u201cWhat do we mean when we say \u2018space\u2019? What do we mean when we say \u2018space-time\u2019?\u201d There are these metaphysical questions that I often told myself were for the philosophers. This book was me letting myself think of them as physics.<\/p>\n One metaphor you invoke is the \u201cedge\u201d \u2014 not only the edge of the universe and of scientists\u2019 understanding, but also existing at the edge of certain identities.<\/strong><\/p>\n In \u201cDisordered Cosmos,\u201d I talked a lot about being at the margin and looking toward the center. With \u201cThe Edge of Space-Time,\u201d I\u2019m choosing to make the margin the center of the story. Part of that was me fully embracing what makes me the physicist I am. I\u2019m an L.A. Dodgers fan. I love \u201cAlice in Wonderland.\u201d I love \u201cStar Trek.\u201d There\u2019s lots of all of that in the book.<\/p>\n Picking a metaphor is a culturally situated decision. I wrote a line that says black holes are the best laid edges in the universe. I did, at some point, think that only some people were going to get this. But for people who don\u2019t understand the reference to Black hairstyles, the sentence is still legible. And for those who do, it will feel like we just had an in-group moment. Anyone who thinks about laying their edges deserves to have an in-group moment in a physics book. Because we are physics, too.<\/p>\n Black students are often told that if you want to be a physicist, then you will make yourself as close to such-and-such mold as possible. At a young age, we have this understanding that whiteness and science are associated with each other, but we are also witnessing in ourselves that this can\u2019t be entirely correct. There\u2019s this narration of, \u201cWell, sure, you can be Black in physics, but that means you have to acclimate to the \u2018in physics\u2019 part, and never that physics has to acclimate to the Black part.\u201d<\/p>\n I use the example of rapper Big K.R.I.T.\u2019s song \u201cMy Sub Pt. 3 (Big Bang),\u201d in which someone tries to wire up subwoofers in his car but fries the wires because he doesn\u2019t ground them properly. I don\u2019t know if Big K.R.I.T. would think of this as a science story, but I think we should learn to read it as one. Not to contain it in science, but to say it overlaps there. This can be a rap song. It can be about the cultural significance of subwoofers and the Big Bang as a metaphor for the beat. And it can also be about cosmology and about how everybody who wires up cars or does this kind of work is a scientist, too.<\/p>\n How do you want readers to approach this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n There is this feeling that you\u2019re supposed to read a book like this and walk away an expert. That\u2019s actually not the point of this book at all. The point is to wander through physics. Even if math terrifies you, you are entitled to spend some time with it.<\/p>\n And so here, I have made you a book with a bunch of tidbits on the oddities of the universe. The universe is stranger and more queer and more wonderful and more full of possibility than whatever limitations you might be experiencing right now. Physics challenges what we are told are social norms. For example, non-trinary neutrinos are fundamental to our standard model of physics.<\/p>\n \u201cNon-trinary,\u201d as in they shift between three different forms.<\/strong><\/p>\n Non-trinary is natural. It\u2019s such a challenge to the current anti-trans rhetoric that says people can only ever be one thing.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t need my book to be the most important thing that someone reads. But I want it to be a source of hope. If it reminds you that, as my mom says, the universe is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us, then that\u2019s all you need to remember. I\u2019m good with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much of the praise for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein\u2019s debut book in 2021, \u201cThe Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[271],"tags":[211931,211927,3128,211925,18,19,17,452,30265,211928,211924,133,16187,49145,211930,211926,211929],"class_list":["post-484650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-and-dreams-deferred-book","tag-and-the-cosmic-dream-boogie-book","tag-books-and-literature","tag-chanda","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-physics","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-and-poets","tag-prescod-weinstein","tag-science","tag-space-and-astronomy","tag-spacetime","tag-the-disordered-cosmos-a-journey-into-dark-matter","tag-the-edge-of-space-time-particles","tag-university-of-new-hampshire"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116574133422378408","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}