THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME

Prying the universe open to make sure there’s room for everyone.

“Physicists are professional boundary-pushers,” writes Prescod-Weinstein (The Disordered Cosmos, 2021) in this wide-ranging survey of modern physics and cosmology. And she’s certainly pushing some boundaries, stylistically and politically. “The universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism, y’all,” she writes in a preface that opens with an Akan proverb and ends with a Hebrew prayer. Drawing from her African roots and Jewish heritage, her work in theoretical physics, her queerness, and references ranging from Langston Hughes to Big K.R.I.T., Prescod-Weinstein explores the edges of our knowledge, our cosmos, our metaphors, and our sociocultural norms. In scholarly but lively prose, she explains the Big Bang, relativity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics, calling attention to their cultural contexts. Relativity’s intermixing of space and time may have seemed strange to European Newtonians, but was common, for instance, in Hebrew prayers and in the Bantu language. And while curved space-time may have been foreign to Western scientists with their linear, Cartesian coordinates, the Palikur people of the Amazon “use a curvilinear coordinate system that they developed to mirror the shape of [a] giant anaconda snake.” One would hope that a physicist advocating a queer perspective would give us the science but tell it slant, but the explanations of the physics itself are for the most part old hat. Prescod-Weinstein is at her best when she lets the personal slip in: the ideas she’s changed her mind about, the experiments that keep her up at night, the questions she can’t let go. “There is a bizarre cultural tendency to treat physicists in particular as fascinating enigmas whose brains exist beyond the realm of everyday human politics,” she writes. “This isn’t true. The universe…is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more and no less.” That humanity shines through her writing. One feels a mind present on the page, actively working through ideas, producing a text that’s engaging and alive.

For readers put off by the overwhelmingly male, white, heteronormative world of physics, here is a warm, impassioned welcome.