Physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein finished her latest book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, shortly before the 2024 election. By the time it came out this April, the American scientific landscape had been radically altered (some might say “ravaged”) by the Trump Administration.
As a result of this time lapse, on some pages, the book’s almost mirthful exploration of physics via a diverse range of pop culture references can inspire a certain nostalgia for the era in which it was penned. At the same time, in the current research environment, where grant funding for entire fields of science can vanish overnight on a political whim, Prescod-Weinstein’s writings on who scientific institutions are here to serve feel especially urgent.
A professor at the University of New Hampshire, and a former member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel at the Department of Energy, Prescod-Weinstein previously authored The Disordered Cosmos, which weaves together astrophysics, critical theory, and the author’s lived experience as a Black queer woman in academia. With her latest book, she aims to educate the reader about various complex theoretical physics concepts, navigating the science via a jukebox of pop culture citations, from Star Trek to Alice in Wonderland to Queen Latifah, and beyond. But she also argues that science and theoretical physics are inherently political, that scientific institutions are deeply wed to colonialism and capitalism—and that marginalized voices need urgently to be woven into the conversation.
I recently spoke with Prescod-Weinstein about the importance of peering at science through the proverbial looking glass—from upside down and inside out—and why her favorite experiment imparts a “feeling that we have to reorient and revise our sense-making about the world.”
What made you choose Star Trek, Alice in Wonderland, and Queen Latifah to help you tell your story?
I’m an older millennial, so I started watching MTV when I was 3. I was that toddler who was glued to music videos. It’s very natural for me to link film and music with the way that I think. For instance, there’s a lot of Alice in Wonderland in the book, and just thinking about Tom Petty’s music video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which is a riff on Alice in Wonderland—that was a very influential music video for me. My brain thinks in references. You’re seeing my brain splat on the page. But pop culture is also where people are at so it’s a way to connect with readers, to welcome them in.
What was your goal in writing The Edge of Space-Time?
I wanted to make the case for a humanist way of thinking about what we do in particle physics and cosmology. I wanted to get away from these arguments that suggest science is just providing a technical service—to say that we also provide something that has spiritual significance to people and to humanity. It has a long-standing cultural significance, even if in a different framework.
You cover a lot of scientific ground throughout the book. Was there one bit of scientific history that you were most excited to explore?
I devote a whole chapter to the Stern–Gerlach experiment. A bunch of physicists told me it was a fool’s errand to even try and write about that for the general public. But I feel like that’s the one experiment that says to you, “Reality has to be different from what you thought it was.” So many different elements of quantum mechanics are captured and encapsulated in that experiment, including the way that our mathematical formalism has to change in order to capture what’s happening in it. I don’t think you can really sit with the Stern–Gerlach experiment in a very serious way and not come out of it being like, “Oh, the universe is otherwise.”
[The Stern-Gerlach experiment was a landmark experiment in quantum mechanics, conducted in 1922 by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach. It is considered one of the more elegant demonstrations of quantum behavior, and the concept it illustrates—that quantum systems have discrete, measurable states—is foundational to everything from MRI machines to quantum computing.]
You wrote, “If we cannot learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for fascists and authoritarians.” What did you mean by that?
In that line you quote I’m riffing off poets Robert Frost and Natasha Trethewey, but really going back to Robert Frost, who was talking about the importance of understanding the metaphor. So much of what’s communicated to us is in metaphor, and we have to be able to analyze that figurative language. There are all sorts of things people can get away with if we just take things at face value.
If some politician comes along and says that what I’m doing is not war—like “war is peace”—I think there’s a level of abstraction involved in critically analyzing that statement for what’s wrong with it.
In your book you mention the overlap between the queerness of science and the queerness of humanity. Can you elaborate?
I agree with José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of queerness as futurity. The way he understood queerness was that it sits at the boundary of what we think being human is, and what being human can be. As an a-gender person who is socially recognized as a woman, I’m constantly existing at the edge of gender, so it feels natural to me to understand science in these terms: that it is boundary work, as people in the humanities say.
Read more: “How to Rebuild Trust in Science”
You wrote, “Now, more than ever, we are forced to reckon with the fact that science is political.” How are we seeing that manifest?
I first wrote that sentence before the inauguration last year, and obviously it has continued to take on new meaning almost every single day. We’re seeing a very intensive contestation around definitions of gender and definitions of sex, and how scientific thinking about sex and gender has evolved, and some intensive political interference from people who have queerphobic, transphobic, and misogynist political agendas, who are trying to twist science to fit their ideological mold. It’s very similar to Aryan physics under the Nazis, where they decided that anything discovered by Jewish scientists doesn’t count. This turned out to throw out a lot of modern physics.
Some might say science is politicized, but I think science is also political, and that even doing the work of thinking through the gender binary was already a political act. Particularly because we are accountable to the public for our funding—the public is supporting the work that we do, and we’re asking the government to give us money—there’s always a political element to it.
When I was one of the three people who led the Cosmic Probes of Dark Matter topic for the Snowmass report that came out a few years ago, we were writing about the science that had been done and the science that could be done using astrophysical observations to look for evidence and information about dark matter. But we were also very aware that people on Capitol Hill might read what we wrote, and that staffers might read what we wrote. Writers are always thinking about our audiences, and that’s true for scientists as well. That’s especially true when we’re grant writing or writing any documents that have any kind of policy implication.
What are some of your biggest fears about what the Trump administration is doing in regard to science?
It’s hard to pick a biggest fear, because they all feel equally ginormous right now. I think one that hasn’t gotten as much attention is, there’s lots of discussion about the attacks on DEI and programs that were designed to promote opportunity and well-being for people from traditionally underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds in the sciences and beyond, but I’m not sure the general public fully appreciates what the downstream impact of that is. No Black graduate students means no Black faculty in 10 to 20 years, and that’s a gap you can’t rapidly repair, because the training of a professional has a certain timeline associated with it. A Ph.D. is five to seven years. People spend between three and eight years as a postdoc. You’re maybe talking about one or two decades where you have just decimated the participation of a population.
We’re not at the point where there are no Black graduate students, but certainly the attacks on these programs are going to significantly decrease the numbers. It’s not something where in 2040 we can be like, okay, tomorrow we would like to have more Black faculty in this field. If there has been one or two decades of low to no Ph.D. production — particularly for Black women and nonbinary people, where the numbers continue to be very low … I think that is one of the things that scares me a lot.
Do you think we can rebuild the scientific enterprise?
I don’t know if we can rebuild American science to what it was before, and I don’t mean that in a nationalist way, I just mean literally geographically located in the United States. Because when there’s a whole generation of graduate students, race, gender, identity aside—graduate programs aren’t admitting students. My program’s not taking new students for next year. So there’s one year, for sure, of graduate students that we’ve lost.
There’s a whole generation of postdocs that was wiped out last year when grants were canceled. Those people are not going to be in the faculty mix. Universities are panicking about funding, and so they’re not going to be hiring faculty for the next few years in many cases. We’re an apprenticeship system, so you need someone senior to train the junior person. If you don’t have those senior people, you lose expertise.
Now, in principle, you can solve this problem by bringing people in from outside the country, but who’s going to want to come here if the norm has now become, if you’re here on a visa, we might send you to a concentration camp on a whim? It’s going to be really hard to recruit foreign talent to fill in the gaps the United States has created for itself.
It’s like that meme where the guy sticks a stick in his bicycle wheel on steroids. Because you have made it so that you can’t do your own work, and you’ve also made it so that anybody who might help you do it doesn’t want to. I’m not good enough at diplomacy or whatever to figure out how you solve that trust problem. Those students are going to Europe now. They’re going elsewhere. China is investing a lot in its infrastructure. Good for them. If I was a foreign student, that’s what I would be looking at. And I don’t think we recover that.
Do you have any advice on how we face this moment? With regard to science or otherwise?
As my mom said, the universe is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us. We have to remain committed to the bigger universe, because it’s exactly what the fascists don’t want us to do. They don’t want us imagining a universe beyond them, without them, that’s bigger and more powerful than them. 
Lead image: Pol Solé / Adobe Stock
