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The afternoon I speak with the physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, two voluminous watermelon earrings dangle from her ears. In recent months, the watermelon has become a symbol of Palestinian liberation; a reference to dishes like fatet ajer, a blend of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and the bright red fruit. The gesture is typical for Prescod-Weinstein, who has built a career as a renowned astrophysicist, Black feminist, and activist while refusing to leave anyone behind, no matter the room she’s in.
“I have a responsibility to refuse to assimilate into a scientific culture that assumes white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and militarism are simply the cost of doing business,” she writes in her acclaimed 2021 book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. “I also know that we are approaching the end of the world, and if we are to salvage life as we understand it and work to avoid repeating the series of events that led us here, we will need a new way of thinking and being in relationship with each other.”
The book is a deep dive into the expansive world of particle physics and cosmology, as well as a clarion call for transformation. Even as she discusses quarks and supernovae, Prescod-Weinstein also proposes a more expansive public transportation system for her hometown of Los Angeles, one that would make it easier for young Black children to access undiluted views of the night sky. At academic institutions, she imagines ending the symbiotic relationship between the United States military and science departments. And these are just two proposals. Throughout the book, her vision for a truly liberatory scientific culture is as vast, awe-inspiring, and sparkling as the stars.
In addition to writing, Prescod-Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Physics and a core faculty member in women’s and gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also the lead axion wrangler for the NASA STROBE-X Probe Concept Study, which probes black holes. Currently, the scientist is at work on two upcoming books — an approachable, pop-culture inflected tour of quantum physics and a text exploring how the cosmos is a "Black aesthetic."
Below, we discuss the relationship between Black and Palestinian liberation, turning everyone into a physics nerd, and the importance of astronomy during bleak times.
The conversation echoes the words of her mother, Margaret Prescod, which serve as an epigraph to The Disordered Cosmos: “People need to know that we live in a universe that is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.”
You write, “The Universe is always more bizarre, more wonderfully queer than we might think.” Can you talk about some of the ways that queerness emerges in physics and cosmology?
With The Disordered Cosmos, I didn’t spend a lot of time writing about quantum mechanics. One section was added because of a conversation I saw with the drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi. They were speaking about nonbinary people and said, “Well, it’s obviously perfectly natural because particles can also be waves. So why can’t people be two things at the same time?”
It’s a metaphor in some ways, but it’s also understanding science. I really had to sit and think and be careful not to say, “This is what being nonbinary is.” For some people, it means that they feel like a woman on some days and a man on others. For some nonbinary people, it means that they don’t experience gender in that way at all.
Where did the idea for your next book, tentatively titled The Edge of Space-Time, come from?
I got tenure last year and was grappling with what I had to give up in order to receive that. I wanted to reflect on the questions that drove me in the first place. I was also curious about the questions the public wanted to know. One of the hardest comments I get about The Disordered Cosmos is “I loved the book, but I didn’t understand the science.” It needles me a bit because I feel like I didn’t do a good enough job. But I also realized that, happily, a lot of people who don’t usually pick up books about science picked mine up. That meant that I was dealing with an audience who might have educational trauma from a school system that didn’t respect them or the way their brain worked. With the next book, I knew I was going to have to be more attentive to that reader along the way.
The Edge of Space-Time is not only for physicists or science nerds. I hope it will turn people into science nerds. I am the religious right’s nightmare; I think everybody should be queer. I want everyone on the physics nerd journey. I want everybody to be like “Cosmology is fucking awesome. Particle physics is fucking awesome.” I want some good queer house music about particle physics.
And you’re working on a third book, too, right?
Yes, I am. That one will probably be called The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic. It’s going to be an academic book that reorients how we think about the relationship between Blackness, science, and cosmic thought. It’s not going to be a comprehensive history, but it will be an invitation. “What if we start from the premise that the cosmos is a Black aesthetic?” When we talk about Black aesthetics, science needs to be in there.
What are some of your favorite examples of the cosmos being a Black aesthetic?
I think my favorite example is the 2014 Big KRIT album “Cadillactica,” which uses the Big Bang as a metaphor for the birth of Southern hip-hop. There are of course a lot of examples of cosmic aesthetics in Afro-Futurist artwork, perhaps the most famous being the Sun-Ra film Space is the Place. But in my work, I also argue that rational knowledge production — what is in some cultures called science — is part of Black aesthetic sensibilities and that philosophical analyses of Black aesthetics have to take technoscientific activity into account. I’m a big fan of Black feminist thinker Katherine McKittrick’s book Dear Science and Other Stories which takes the view that Black thought is a form of “scientia,” knowledge that in her reading is “animated” by science. A story that appears in Paul Taylor’s book Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics is about kidnapped Africans who had just survived the Middle Passage and were asked to clean themselves up before being sold on the auction block in what is now Suriname. Given a broken bottle to shave their heads, they carved cosmic images into their hair. Taylor identifies this as an early example of Black aesthetic activity in the so-called “new world.” To me, it is a story about how the cosmos is a Black aesthetic, even in the most harrowing moments.
One of the things you describe well in The Disordered Cosmos is the relationship between academic institutions, the military, and totalitarianism. It seems more important than ever to talk about that right now with what we’re seeing in Gaza.
Yes. It can be hard to find the words for the genocide we’re witnessing. It is simple to name what is happening, but not all the ways in which it is. One thing is that new technologies are being tested. We have seen reporting from various outlets about the use of so-called “artificial intelligence” for site selection for bombing. I’m not a computer scientist, I’m not an AI person, but I am thinking about this as a scientist. If you tell people a computer did this, you are giving them some psychological shield from having to see themselves as responsible for choosing to push the button to drop the bomb, to shoot the missile, to send soldiers in.
In terms of the question of authoritarianism, racism is a total system. The racism that Palestinians who are inside Israel's internationally recognized borders and outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders and all the places of historical Palestine are experiencing is a total system of apartheid, racism, and colonialism.
It’s not about keeping Jewish people safe. I am a Jew of color living in a community where there are active white supremacists who are violently anti-semitic. For me, this is not a hypothetical. It’s not a rhetorical talking point because I’m pro-Palestine. It is a real talking point because I am pro-people. I am pro-Palestine. I am pro-Judaism. I am pro all of us being safe wherever we are.
How have you approached this moment as a professor?
I will say this time has given me hope in some ways. If you had told me in 2000, when the Second Intifada started, that there would be large numbers of students who were willing to risk everything that they had busted their asses for, I don’t know if I would have believed that. And when I talk about busting their asses, I mean, really. Whether how difficult it was to get into college, or whether you have to work 30-hour weeks to pay tuition. Students took risks to go into the encampments in large numbers. I think for me as a faculty member, it was hard to watch the response that they got. These students were experimenting with what it means to be a socially engaged person who is actually paying attention to what's going on, and who is thinking about what world they want to build. And that is a beautiful display of humane investment in each other and in the future of our species and the future of our planet.
I think the credit that is not given and that I kept hoping people would talk about during Black History Month is that the Movement for Black Lives made Palestine a plank of its platform at the very beginning. A lot of people took very serious hits for doing that. There were a lot of attacks. People started saying Black Lives Matter was an anti-semitic movement. People lost jobs and grant funding. But I think that is one of the significant reasons that people were able to mobilize so quickly in the ways that they were. Black Lives Matter has normalized that Palestine is one of our issues. It is a Black issue. It is a movement issue. The encampments were a really beautiful display of a multicultural moment — and the attacks on the encampments were attacks on experiments in inclusive multiracial, multicultural, and multireligious formations.
There was so much spirit, power, and possibility for a different world in those spaces, and that is one of the reasons they were attacked. I hope even though many of those encampments no longer exist, those lessons live on with the people who participated and I hope that they carry them forward and continue those experiments.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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