714. The Edge of Space-Time with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

[intro]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 714 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. When you subscribed to this podcast, I bet you thought, When is Sarah going to interview an expert on theoretical physics? Well, today is your day! My guest is Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of the book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. I found this book to be both incredibly engaging and just the right amount of challenging. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is going to explain space-time and how theoretical physics, Black feminist theory, Robert Frost, and the cosmos are all connected. If you held your breath during the liftoff of Artemis II and were crying when they splashed down safely, do not worry, so was I, but this is the perfect time for this conversation. I was extremely excited to interview Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, and the timing could not be more ideal. We are in very good hands.

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 Support for this episode comes from The Awkward Agenda, an open-door romance featuring friends-to-lovers, found family, and pirate cosplay from author Beth Morton.

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When Simon comes across Cali, he offers to help her dismantle her social anxiety by taking her on a tour of the kind of awkward experiences she’s avoided. Helping her makes him realize just how closed-off his own life had become, and having someone to laugh with makes opening up far easier. They learn to see one another for who they really are, but trusting themselves does not come easy, and letting go might be the hardest trick of all.

The Awkward Agenda has excellent averages on StoryGraph and Goodreads, and the reviews on Goodreads are so thoughtful. One reader wrote:

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The Awkward Agenda by Beth Morton is available now digitally in Kindle Unlimited and in print from retailers everywhere. You can find links in the show notes to find a copy. Thank you to Beth Morton for sponsoring this episode and thank you for supporting our advertisers.

Are you ready to go to the edge of space-time? Let’s do this: on with my conversation with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

[music]

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Hi, I’m Chanda Prescod- Weinstein. I’m an associate professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire. I’m also core faculty in women’s and gender studies, and I am the author of the new book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.

Sarah: I love the title. I am so excited to talk to you about this book. But I am, as you know, I’m a, a romance critic, I’m a romance author and nonfiction author, and I’m a podcaster. So this is so not my field. Please tell me about The Edge of Space-Time. When, when people ask you about this book, what do you say to them?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I mean, so I guess I will say in, like, my childish way, this is like my show and tell book? [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes! Awesome!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, so I think, I had just gotten tenure when I started working on it, and so I was kind of doing a re-evaluation of what are the things that brought me to physics in the first place, and what are the things that make me feel connected to physics, and how can I share that with the world? And so in a big way, this was me returning to my roots of what are the big, fundamental picture questions about physics that excited me in the first place?

Then I think the other thing about it is wanting to say to people, This is a perspective that you should have access to, that you’re entitled to, and it will literally change the way you look at the world on an everyday basis. So it’s not about, Oh, you have to go look through a telescope. It’s about turning on a light and realizing that there are photon particles flying out of the light. And that’s really cool! That –

Sarah: It –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that’s the whole thing.

Sarah: It is extremely cool. The thing I love about it is that you can really, you can really sense your enthusiasm? Like, you were clearly having a good old time writing this book.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes! [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, excellent! So to start off with a very big question, because if, if people who are listening are like me and they’re not as familiar, could you explain what is space-time?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, so this is, like, one of the hardest things to try and explain to people, and I’ve gone, I’m a columnist for, I do a monthly column for New Scientist, and this is one I, my readers know I’ve come back to several times, because basically we can’t answer the, the question in some fundamental way. So I spent like three chapters on this in the book, right? So this is all preface: if you’re feeling confused about it, great, so are we. And that’s –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that’s part of what’s awesome about being a physicist.

So in principle, space-time is a merger of, we live in three dimensions. I don’t think any of the listeners here are, are two-dimensional; I think you have three dimensions. You have height; you have width; you have depth, right? So those are your three spatial dimensions. And then if you think about it, so I’m forty-three years old, so my time dimension is forty-three years. So –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I’m whatever, I’m like five foot seven, I have forty-three years, I have some width, I have some depth, and that is my, that is my, those are my measurements in space-time. So if you want to have some kind of intuition for what space-time is, you can think about all of those things coming together. Now, you might ask yourself, well, why do I need to worry about the spatial measurements and the time measurements at the same time? And it turns out that because the speed of light is constant, no matter how the source of the light is moving, that this has radical implications for how time and space are measured, and actually they mix together, especially when you’re at high speeds.

Sarah: That part blew my mind. Like, I was sitting at dinner last night with my husband –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – and I’m like, Did you know –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes!

Sarah: – that the speed of light is a constant? Like, everything else is a friggin variable, but the speed of light is like, Nope, not changing; I remain constant, and how weird that is? And he’s like, Wait. This is not our usual dinnertime conversation. What?!

[Laughter]

Sarah: It was so cool! So cool. And I think that really comes through in the book. You are very excited about this, and you want to explain it to other people because it really does sort of change the way you see the things around you.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I, I, I love hearing you talk about this because this is the impact I wanted to have on readers and on the people around them. I actually do want people to share the work. There is actually a part in the book where I’m actually saying, Go talk to people about what you just learned and, and see how that sits with you. That, I think there is this tendency to understand scientists as like lone geniuses or whatever, because there’s the stereotype about Albert Einstein that doesn’t even necessarily have anything to do with how he actually operated, that this was just a guy off in a corner by himself talking to nobody. And –

Sarah: Nah, bro, had a wife and everything!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right! And she was a skilled mathematician herself?

Sarah: Fundamental to his research!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right. And so science is a very social phenomenon, and so I actually would be quite happy for people to treat this book in a very social way and read it in community with each other as opposed to a solo experience.

Sarah: And, and I’m, honestly, I’m kind of in awe because the premise of this book at the start is that you, you sort of start out by saying, okay, the title is The Edge of Space-Time. But before we get there, I need to explain space, and then I need to explain time and then gravity and related topics, and then you’re going to slowly walk people all the way out to the edge to explain why it’s important. Piece of cake.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Was there a moment when you were writing this, you were like, What did, what did I just do? Oh boy. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: You know, the funny thing is – and you’ve been, you’ve been doing book world stuff for, I think this is year twenty-one? Of, of –

Sarah: Yes, Smart Bitches –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – Trashy Books is twenty-one years old, yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, you’re, you’re twenty-one years old. So I’m sure you’ve heard this before, that each book kind of tells you about itself as you’re writing it?

Sarah: Oh boy, does it, yes. That is very true.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I definitely had that experience with this one. The chapter that I really had in mind and the idea that I really had in mind, Oh, I’m definitely going to open with this, ended up, I think it’s like chapter nine.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So it’s actually like halfway through the book? [Laughs] And I think part of it was, like, continuously having these conversations with myself, and there was a lot of, like, mapping that I had to do, and I am not an outliner? I’m, I’ve been hostile to outlining since childhood, it just like wasn’t how my brain worked, and this time I really had to be like, well, my brain needs it even if my brain doesn’t like it. Like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And particularly with the stuff where I get into quantum physics, I have a notebook where I was just diagramming over and over again how the different things connected to each other and what order they could be presented in, and I think the thing that I found really difficult about this is that in my head, it’s all connected in loops, but in a book, has to come out linearly. It has to come out in an order.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And figuring out how I was going to put that in order was actually a real challenge.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I think sometimes there are places in the book where you might see elements of me talking to the reader about that process of, like, making these decisions?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I think that’s maybe something I do a little bit differently from other science writers is I think –

Sarah: Oh, definitely! Definitely.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – we’re trained in this maybe kind of masculine way and faux objectivity way to be like, pretend you’re not there on the page, and I was like, No, this is all me on the page just being like, Look at this; it’s cool! Look at this; it’s cool! [Laughs]

Sarah: I think that if the book were a visual medium, you are between us who don’t know very much about this and all of this knowledge that you are aware of, and instead of, like, picking us up and putting us in the knowledge, you’re like, Okay, I’m going to guide you through it. It’s almost like you’re, you know how all these TikTok videos have like a picture and then there’s this sort of floating person who moves around the screen. That’s you like, Okay, so over here is this cool thing. Okay, but hang on, trust me, there’s more cool things in a minute. Okay, and over here – it’s almost visual!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right.

Sarah: Because you really are present and like, This is what I think is cool and why I think it’s important. So just trust me, I’m going to lead you through some complex things. And you’re very upfront about that, which, honestly, I apol-, I, I have to appreciate so much, because there were moments where I was like, I don’t know what I just read. Hang on, let me start over. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Good! I mean, and I think, you know, one of the hard things about writing physics for general audiences is that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – it is inevitable that those moments are going to happen?

Sarah: Oh, for sure!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Because it is, our universe is complicated. It’s weird, it’s queer, it’s unexpected, and there’s no way around that. And I think sometimes there can feel kind of a pressure to create ways around that?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I was very, I was, I was thinking a lot about what does my reader lose if I decide to skip this? And so, to pick an example – I don’t know if this stood out to you – there’s one section, I think this is in a footnote, but there’s one section where I was trying to figure out how to write about something in relation to gravity –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I was like, This is really hard; this is a hard concept to explain. Let me just go back to my first book, The Disordered Cosmos, and see how I did it. And then I went back to my first book and I was like, Well, fuck. I just decided not to in the last one because I couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem, so I was like, I’m just going to tell the reader to trust me.

But this time I want to do more than tell the reader to trust me. I want the reader to have a feel for why they should believe what I’m telling them –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and I just hadn’t solved the problem. And there was a lot of that, of trying to decide. I actually don’t want to stand here as an authority figure and say, Just take what I say on face value. I wanted to say, Here’s a logic that you can follow –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – to have your, start developing your own internal sensibility of why you might agree with me about my conclusions.

Sarah: Yes, I did notice that, by the way, and I thought the fact that you were in conversation with yourself and your prior book was so neat? It was very clever! Now there are also –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: …so mad at myself.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I say that all the time: Damn it, Past Sarah, we had an agreement, but you, you – come on, now! [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: Now there were a lot of, like I said, new words and new concepts, so thank you. But, now one I did know was metaphor. I am very familiar with metaphor, and in your first chapter, which I think is one of my favorites, you explain how metaphor is so necessary to explaining and theorizing physics. Could you expand on that point? I thought it was so interesting.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So that, that chapter comes from a, a few different angles. So one of them, it’s called “How to Live Safely in a Science Factual Universe.” And it’s a reference to How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by, the novel by Charles Yu. So there, a little bit of a backstory there is just that, so that’s one of my favorite novels, and when I read it, I was like, Whenever I get to teach general relativity as a professor, I’m going to put this on the syllabus. And it has turned out that I have never gotten to teach that class. It just hasn’t worked out that way because of scheduling and who else is in the physics department with me and is highly qualified to teach the class.

So there was an element of it that I was like, Well, I can’t put it on a syllabus, but I could put it in a book. And I could, in fact, open a book with it and build a chapter that kind of explores why that book stood out to me as a work of fiction that also was really insightful about space-time and the ways that we kind of engage emotionally with our concepts of space and time, because the book is a very emotional book, but it’s also this, like, very powerful meditation on general relativity.

To come back to the question of, of metaphor, I think, you know, I wanted to be honest with people about the way in which physicists are also working with figurative language, that figurative language is not just something that poets do. It’s not just something that, for example, romance writers do as they’re thinking about the different ways that they want to invoke pleasure and the erotic, right?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And there’s a lot of metaphor that happens as part of that process, but that this is something that scientists are also doing. And also, it’s a way of talking openly to people about the problems that I’m trying to solve in writing the book, because –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I have to find the metaphors to help communicate these ideas to people without just writing a bunch of equations and expecting people to learn algebra, calculus, topology, and all these other things.

Sarah: One of the metaphors I thought that was most effective was explaining the concept of the ever-forward movement, the inflation of space, where you have a deflated balloon with dots all over it, and that is the in-, you know, the, the incipient moment of the universe, and then as, as it keeps expanding, everything just keeps moving, moving, moving, moving. So we are always moving, even if we think we are still? So that kept me up for like an hour –

[Laughter]

Sarah: – thinking about it? Because I, I know, like, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve watched enough space documentaries to know, for example, that the things that are in orbit around us are actually falling towards us, just slowly and in a big circle. And I’m like, Well, eventually they’re going to land. Well, yes, but not for a while. But how come? Like, this is, there’s a big gulf in my knowledge here. And the way in which you deploy metaphor – there is the, a balloon, there’s fabric, there’s – I do, I do love Gravity Girl, by the way?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Very cool. You are so right that metaphor is so important, but also you explore language, because the language that we use – I mean, for example, right now we’re using English. This would be a different conversation with a whole different set of nuances if we were speaking in different languages, and you also move into African language families to, to talk about time. Metaphors are really fraught in physics, because you are trying to describe something that’s very specific and accurate with language that goes around it. That’s, that’s, like, super hard. Is this a common discussion within physicists? Like, how do we deploy the correct metaphor or explanation? Or is this something that professors are sort of doing as they teach?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: You know, I think we’re not trained to speak about it in those terms. And –

Sarah: Mm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I think in a way I come at things differently. One, because I’m a lit nerd.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] And that shines through, I’m sure.

Sarah: Lit-, just a little bit.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Just a little bit, yeah.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I’m a lit nerd, and I also do work in Black studies and Black feminist studies –

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and so I also have the analytic frame that comes with doing that kind of work of thinking about Black women’s lives and what Black feminism can, can teach us. And I, in a way, one of the audiences I had in mind was actually Black scholars who are interested in physics, but often have to go to writing by white male scientists to learn about physics because there just aren’t that many books by Black folks, particularly Black women on these topics.

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so I was thinking, How can I talk to them about the tensions that I kind of see around metaphor? And in particular, in my first book, I have a whole chapter about the way in which people sometimes compare Black people to dark matter, and how this is a comparison that really makes me nuts. And this is actually –

Sarah: I’m sorry, buh-buh? Buh-buh?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: It’s, it’s quite common in Black studies that people have kind of taken this up as like a positive and right, and I think the – eh – I think the reaction you’re having is also the one that I had the first time I saw it, because I was like, No, I don’t want to treat Black people like a different kind of matter. I want us to be understood as, we are vis-, visible matter like everybody else’s. And this is also, my first confrontation with that particular metaphor was after Black Lives Matter protests had really started taking off, and so I was reacting to – and I, and I first saw, actually, a white woman physicist use the metaphor before I realized it was coming out of Black studies – and so I was really thinking about, like, the vehicle, that she had taken this idea because she saw people in Black studies using it, and then people in Black studies were citing her work, and there was this kind of this feedback loop where nobody was intervening and saying, But let’s talk about the way that maybe folks on the Black studies side are reading something that misinforms them about the physics? And she, as a physicist, is reading something that misinforms her about Black thought and Black lives. And so there was a lot of, that’s, that was really, like, my first confrontation with, I need everyone to understand that when you say dark in the Black community, that has a different context than when you say dark among people who don’t think as much about colorism and racism.

So it, it is, in a way, that first chapter really emerges from my experience being a Black physicist in a way that I think maybe a white physicist wouldn’t have come to the same thing because they wouldn’t have needed it in the same way.

So there was that piece of it, and then I think, because I started thinking about it, I just started noticing all the different metaphors that people use. And then I also, you know, read this Robert Frost essay about the importance of education by poetry, and I came to that because of a Natasha Trethewey essay about race and metaphor, where she talks about Robert Frost.

And so there really was, like, it’s, for me, a collision of lit nerd, being a Black physicist, being a science communicator, all of those things coming together at once. And then somehow turning that into a coherent thing for the page. [Laughs]

Sarah: Wow. I’m still stuck on the whole idea that Black people are, are dark matter. Like – wow!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right. I do actually think that often there’s a fundamental misunderstanding at work there –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – because for, I think, a lot of Black readers, you have to think about how the metaphor works, right?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so if you’re someone who has a specific association with darkness and how darkness gets invoked in a white supremacist society –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and then someone comes along and says, There’s this form of matter that’s actually the majority of the matter in the universe, and it invisibly holds things together, people start to say, Well, that’s kind of like the way that the, the global majority is invisibilized in systems of white supremacy.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So there’s an element of that that I see, but I also feel like it then enables, the metaphor then enables, on the other side, this exception of, I can think of Black people as being fundamentally made of something different, and among scientists that has a particular power. And we think about the fact that surveys of medical students still show that they misestimate the levels of pain that Black people and Black women are in particular capable of experiencing, that Black birth parents struggle to get adequate care in birthing rooms, and it’s because of racist stereotypes that actually you don’t want scientists walking around thinking Black people are made of different kind of stuff.

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right? And so the metaphor is working on both groups of people, but it’s doing very different work. And I don’t think people were really acknowledging that it was doing different kinds of work on different types of readers and different kinds of thinkers.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And it’s interesting to, to think about this. This is not just a science problem? I think that you could find this in any genre of writing or communication, right?

Sarah: It’s very true! It also, the, the idea of, of – I, my brain is just like, What? My understanding, correct me if I’m wrong, of, of dark matter is that it is also invisible and hypothetical. And that makes me think of how so many of my Black friends have talked about how they’ll be walking down the street and people won’t get out of their way. It’s like, they don’t even see them; they just bump into people all the time. And that, the idea, like, no, you don’t want to call a, a whole group of humans invisible. That, that’s not going to work! We already have that problem! [Laughs] Let’s not reinforce it; that’s a bad idea!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Well, and I think that this – I, I, I appreciate that particular example. I’ve definitely had the example of people just, like – and I’m a light-skinned person, and I still have the experience of people just, like, not seeing that I’m, I’m there. And I think, like, this is also one of the things that I think through is, what are the limitations of our metaphors? And this is actually –

Sarah: Yes!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – one of the ways in which the metaphor falls apart. Because in the case of dark matter, out in the cosmos – so most of the matter in our galaxy, the Milky Way, is actually dark matter.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And it’s completely invisible, and what that means is that light literally goes through it. Light just doesn’t interact with it. So –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – if you put a dark matter particle in front of a photon, the photon will – the only thing that will happen is there will be some gravitational, maybe, interaction between the dark matter particle and space-time, and that might affect the trajectory of the photon. So it might affect –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – how the, where the photon goes. But in this case, if someone doesn’t know that I’m there, they’re going to run into me, or I’m going to have to make the decision to move myself out of the way, right?

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so there is – dark matter is not being made to be invisible. That is actually, it is its fundamental nature, and that is a cool thing about it.

Sarah: Yes!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Whereas in a white supremacist society, Black people are being invisibilized, and there is a social force that is enforcing that.

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And it’s not cool. [Laughs] Right?

Sarah: No.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So – and I, and I, I do think, particularly within the physics community, seeing how normalized racism is and how people don’t talk about it, it felt very dangerous to me that it almost felt like people were getting this excuse to be like, Well, it’s just that, like, that’s the nature of things. But it is not the nature of humanity for white supremacy to exist. That is a feature of how things function now, but that is a choice that is being made –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – by the people who participate.

Sarah: And if it’s a choice that’s being made by the people who are participating, then metaphors have even more weight and meaning –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.

Sarah: – because they just reinforce something that everyone just assumes is a default. No!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right.

Sarah: All of these defaults are a choice.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right, right, exactly.

Sarah: Yeah.

So this is also a really dangerous book for people, because my reading list, my TBR pile is much bigger. I mean –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right. [Laughs]

Sarah: – oh my gosh! You, you, you cite so many different sources! So many different sources! And you are drawing from, I mean, you’ve already mentioned Robert Frost, and I was like, oh, Robert Frost, my physicist buddy now!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: You mentioned poetry, rap, history, folklore, and science, and, like, I, I read this thinking really no book is, is safe from you. No book is safe from you: it will be cited, and, and it’s probably about science. Which made me think, Okay, is that the case? When you read something, does it eventually lead back to science for you?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Okay, I love this question, because it is absolutely, this is one of my forms of hyper focusing, I think? Is –

Sarah: Oh, I can’t wait! Tell me everything. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I, I do think I read a book and will come back and announce to the author, if it’s someone I know, Did you know that this is a science studies book? Because –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Particularly with, like, fellow academics, I’ll come back and be like, Yeah, so you were talking about, you know, the Middle Passage and slave ships in this particular way, and have you thought about, like, the technological aspect of, of, of that element in the book and how your book is illuminating the ways in which technology is imbricated with colonialism and enslavement and the, the trade in human flesh?

So I, I absolutely am someone who is always reading for that. And I think some of it is personality and curiosity. I do think at this point also – there was a point when I was a younger person when I was interacting for the first time with feminist philosophy of science, and the feminist philosophers were analyzing the way that gender shaped how science happened, scientific outcomes, and that kind of thing. And I would run into things with some frequency that would say, Oh yes, physics, there’s sexism in the field, but knowledge in physics isn’t affected by gender because the, the laws of physics are universal! And I spent a lot of time being like, Yes, the laws of physics are universal. I don’t expect that, you know, a nonbinary person is going to discover a different theory of gravity than a, a het-cis person is going to. But I can tell you for a fact that I have witnessed the way that sexism and racism have shaped knowledge outcomes in physics. And the piece that I think people were missing was that who is in the room and who gets pushed out of the room, that sometimes they take lines of thought with them when they go. And that’s not because those, those lines of thought are necessarily genetically unique to them or –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – culturally unique to them, but it happens to be that that was the person who was advocating for an idea. Particularly, when you do a Ph.D. in physics, you become the world’s expert on a problem and how it should be solved. If you feel like this shit is too racist and I am not pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship, which is like being a medical resident –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – then you are taking your world-class expertise on that solution with you when you walk out of the field.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so I think it became kind of a habit of, now I need to read for the things that people missed, not because they were intending to be harmful or necessarily did anything wrong, but because there are gaps there. And I was figuring out that I was maybe one of a small number of people who was uniquely positioned to fill in those gaps because of all the reading that I was doing. And a lot of it is synthesis, and at the end of the day – I don’t know if you picked up on this – I feel like the book is just a book about close reading? [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah! Oh yeah. This is, this is a book about the close, I think, the close reading and also the absolute spec-, specificity of meaning in language.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mmm!

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I love that. I’m going to use your summary now.

Sarah: Oh! Please do! Take it as far as you wish. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Thank you!

Sarah: What were some sources that you were so excited to include?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So I think one you’ve probably picked up on is, at one point, I think I read this on Wikipedia. I think I was trying to figure out how to talk about Newton’s laws –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – in the book. And I should say, by the way, I had, like, a mostly hate-hate relationship with classical physics, or specifically classical mechanics, Newtonian mechanics.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And one of the projects of this book was like, How do I make this interesting to me?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I think I succeeded. But that was part of what was happening, and that’s maybe one of the reasons you see the enthusiasm is because I’m like, Yes, okay, I figured out why this is cool. I figured out how I want to communicate this. And so I read, like, on the Wikipedia that someone was like, Well, actually, Newton, this one law was actually written down in, by a Zhao kingdom philosopher like a thousand years before Newton got to it. And so I was like, Okay, it’s just Wikipedia, so I have to track that down. So I went to the source of that and I was like, Okay, I need to find that person’s source. And before you know it, I was, like, finding the, the only three translations into English of this text and reading all of them side by side.

Sarah: Whoa!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And then starting to notice the other things that are about space and time that are in this text that I hadn’t seen on Wikipedia. And for like two weeks, it was like the only thing that I would talk about when –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – like, anybody tried to talk to me. Like, my poor friends.

Sarah: How are you today? Well, let me tell you. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes! [Laughs] No, that was exactly like – I had, like, these regular calls with my friend Arianne Shahvisi, who’s a feminist philosopher of science in the UK, and I remember getting on the call with her and she was like, So what did you do for the last week? And I was like, I have to tell you about these texts I’ve been reading. And, and like thirty minutes later, she was like, Okay! Like, I’m so glad you’re ex- – like, I’m happy for you! It was sort of that mean, meme like I didn’t read all that, but I’m happy for you –

Sarah: Yeah!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – or condolences.

[Laughter]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: But I was really, I, I feel like the one thing I want to say about that is that the reason I was able to do that is because at different points over the last century in particular, funding organizations and universities decided it was worthwhile to pay for someone to do the very difficult work of reading classical Chinese texts and translating them. And this is very different from what we might call modern Mandarin. The characters are completely different –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and this is a very hard thing to do. This is like years of painstaking work, and so this is a way in which I, as a scientist, have really benefited from funding for, for the humanities. This was one of those moments where I really had to sit with, like, what if nobody ever pays for a translation of this text again? Because the only translations so far have been done by white men.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: At some point, I would like to see a translation by someone who brings a different embodied experience to the page.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: But that may not happen if that support isn’t there. And so for me, that was one of those moments where I was like, this is a very clear, as a scientist, I needed the humanist to be funded.

Sarah: Yes, very true. And because, especially now that translation is being handed wholesale over to AI, which is like massive bummer, hate it so much –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right.

Sarah: – [laughs] – not my favorite? If you have someone who is not a white man translating this work, you’re, you’re, there’s, like you said, the, the particulars of meaning are going to be expanded upon in a way that a white translator would not have, just would not have access to!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, I think there’s that, and, and there’s also the complications –like, I make a particular point of saying it’s Zhao kingdom philosophy. I don’t say it’s Chinese –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and that’s partly because the Zhao kingdom predates imperial China and predates the coalescence of the different parts of the region that we might now call the People’s Republic of China – China. And I think that the, the, there’s a politics of translation that comes with the decisions of what historical meaning and context do you assign to these texts? And I actually had to talk with a friend who, with my friend Meredith Schweig, who is a scholar of Taiwanese hip-hop; that’s one of her, her main focus. And really, when I say Taiwanese hip-hop, hip-hop in Taiwanese, not hip-hop in Mandarin or Taiwanese Mandarin, but hip-hop in the language of Taiwanese. And asking her questions of, like, you know, How do I talk about this? I guess I have to say it’s ancient Chinese, even though that’s, that’s not the, the language that they would have used for it. So thinking forward to what kind of translators I might expect to engage with it in a particular way and thinking, What happens if a Taiwanese scholar who is very attuned to the questions of Taiwanese cultural and political independence takes up the text? It will probably look different than if a Chinese scholar who is, even one from Hong Kong versus someone who is not from Hong Kong, will take it up. And then for an Asian-American or Chinese-American person, it will have a, a, a completely separate meaning, but linked! And so I think – I always, actually, I, I would be curious to hear your thoughts about this – I get stressed out by translation, really stressed out by translation. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my gosh! Literally, I was just thinking, this is so stressful. It’s kind of cool that the only friggin constant is the speed of light, because language is just noodles.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s just noodles in the air! It, it, it’s so imprecise, and yet we’re constantly fighting for precision.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And there’s a huge element of trust that happens –

Sarah: Oh my gosh, yes!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – when you have to read something in translation? Actually, at one point I, I asked for help organizing my files at one point, and my spouse realized that in my Evernote, I had a whole folder where I had squirreled away articles that were entirely debates about translations of Russian literature.

Sarah: Whoooa!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And this was simply because I love Tolstoy and was obsessed with which translation – because I don’t read Russian –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – which translation is giving me Tolstoy? What am I missing? And then getting really stressed out about someone says, Well, this one does this one thing really well, but there’s this other thing that it doesn’t do really well. And so at one point I tried to read three different translations of War and Peace at the same time, because I was like, this is the only way that I will, like – [laughs]

But this is what I mean when I say I get really stressed out.

Sarah: Yes!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Like –

Sarah: It is very stressful! Yeah, well, I mean, if, if your work is in both theoretical and then trying to identify the precision of things, you know, language is so imprecise. It’s, it is very stressful! Because I just want to know what it says. Well, that’s – you know, it’s like, it’s, my, my husband is a, is an attorney; we talk a lot about how law school –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Hmm.

Sarah: – teaches you a way to think and a way to write, and it teaches you a language, and, so he’ll get very, like, especially when we’re, you know, we’re stressed, he’ll get very specific about the language. I’m like, We don’t need to be precise. Like, We always need to be precise. Okay, you’re right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes, you are right. But it’s impossible to do. [Laughs] It’s so hard! And it is very stressful!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I mean, you know, I am also married to an attorney – solidarity.

Sarah: Yeah, right?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: I have said to him, You may not lawyer at home right now. We are not lawyer-ing right now.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: On our second date, we got into an argument about who was worse, physicists or lawyers. And –

Sarah: Oh gosh!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – eventually we came to the conclusion that they’re about the same? But –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – it, it, it really is about the same. And at the same time, you know, language is very fluid. And also –

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I think one of the reasons the writers that we love –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I think are often people who have actually painstakingly stared at each sentence and asked each word –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – Why are you here? And placed that word – I don’t know if you caught my, my brief Mansfield Park reference in, in the book. I – the, the running joke in my household is you have not really talked with me until I brought Mansfield Park up with you?

Sarah: Okay, so I noticed that in the book after I saw your video –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: – where you were talking about how Mansfield Park is really the only best Jane Austen novel, and it is the most critical, and it is the most interesting –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – because she’s basically – she’s so shady. She is making it clear that these people are literally human trash. They are trash people.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] Yes! Yes!

Sarah: They are behaving like trash, but she doesn’t ever say, All right, so that guy is trash. Nonono, you are expected to infer it from things that if you don’t recognize the clues, you don’t see, No, these people are absolute dumpster fires.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right. And I think one of the reasons that people find Mansfield Park frustrating is because you can’t read it as a romance?

Sarah: Nooo!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: There’s nothing romantic about any of the shit that goes on in that book.

Sarah: No, it’s not.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Not even the ending, really, even though, like, you kind of get your “happy ending.” Like – and I think actually reading Mansfield Park in those terms can encourage people to reconsider their readings of other books that sometimes get a kind of glossy treatment –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – because you realize, like, even in the case of Pride and Prejudice, which I know is a lot of people’s darling, that Elizabeth Bennet has decided at the end that she’s willing to make this deal with Mr. Darcy –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – because it is a good deal and they can be good financial life partners.

Sarah: Yup.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I think Mansfield Park really hits that point home: these are deals people are making. I think we also see this in Persuasion.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Persuasion’s also one that’s not very sexy, and it’s hard to, to render it sexy. And I do think that some of the popular readings of these books is sometimes driven by, we have these men who are adapting the books for television? And they’re adapting them with a, a particular desire to capture women audiences in a particular way. And I think it’s fine to have fun with it. I think the thing that frustrates me is that Jane Austen’s voice should also somewhere be in there in what people hear come, coming through? So I, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the different readings that people do, as long as her voice gets found somewhere in there –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – along the way.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Have fun with it, that’s fine, but – like, I loved Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I thought was, like, a particularly –

Sarah: Ah!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that was –

Sarah: Isn’t that fun?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, no –

Sarah: So fun!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – it’s very fun!

But I guess the reason I brought up Jane Austen is because she’s an example of someone who was, like, very particular. You can see that in her sentences, that she was very particular about what word –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: If that word is there, it’s there for a reason.

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And that’s one of the reasons it frustrates me when I feel like I don’t, people aren’t really listening to her, and they’re just allowing themselves to hear her being filtered through people who are trying to sell you something. Because, in part, her book was about that, right?

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Like, her books were about that.

Sarah: Yep. It also reminds me of Shonda Rhimes saying that she looks at the Bridgerton books, which are Regency romances, as workplace dramas, because the business of finding –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] That’s perfect!

Sarah: – an eligible mate is a job.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: It is a job!

Sarah: It’s a job. And even with Pride and Prejudice, I think a lot of readers go to Pride and Prejudice because they’ve read sort of all of the different literary remixes and, and homages –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – to it – there are so many variations of Pride and Prejudice. But when you read the actual text, there’s one moment where Lizzie’s like, Yeah, I totes fell in love with this guy, ‘cause did you see that man’s house? I saw that, did you see his house?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] I fell in love with his house –

Sarah: Yes. I saw his grounds at Pemberley. Did you see the, the house and the garden? Did you see all of – there were deer. I think there’s some fish. If you watch that one movie, they go fishing together. Like, did you see the guy’s house? Why are you asking me if I’m in love with this guy? But the precision with which she writes that sort of, not necessarily yearning, but like, Oh, and he’s cute, damn it. He’s an asshole and he’s cute; hate that!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: That’s a universal feeling. And then, like, wait a minute –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mmm.

Sarah: – this is actually advantageous to us both. It becomes partially, like what you said, a –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mm.

Sarah: – a transaction. It’s a transactional relationship in some ways.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes. Yes.

Sarah: One thing about romance that I love is the fact that a really good romance novel – ‘cause romances are courtship narratives. They are narratives of a courtship between individuals. Could be more than two, could be lots of different genders and combinations, but it’s a courtship narrative. And what writers are trying to do is write down emotion, which is very difficult to express linguistically.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.

Sarah: It, it’s very, very hard to explain what limerence is for an individual, because it might be very different than someone else. Writing down emotion is very hard and very squishy and, and tricky to write down.

What I loved about your book was – and I wrote this down twice because I, I felt this, like, I called it very thought-stilling? Like, I read it, and my whole brain went, Wait a minute, hang on. Let’s read that again – that science is the manifestation of our storytelling tendency. So you see –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mm.

Sarah: – a very clear link between narrative and narrative specificity and science. Could you expand on that a little bit? Because that’s probably my favorite, favorite part of the book.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I feel fairly certain that when I was writing that I was thinking very specifically about the Jamaican and American philosopher-novelist Sylvia Wynter.

Sarah: Silvia Wynter, yeah. She said – I wrote it down:

>> Humans are both biology, and then we are organized around the practice of making narrative.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. So she said we are bios and mythoi. So her, we were, we are homo narrans. That’s a term, a term that she coined to say that we are biological, but we are also storytelling species. And she –

Sarah: I just got, like, full-body tingles at the whole homo narrans. Oh, I dig it so much.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes! Because we – and she was very interested in this idea of autopoiesis, that we were narrating ourselves and crafting ourselves, even as we were simultaneously a biological process that is unfolding. But she really thought of us as an unfolding process that is shaped by how we narrate the unfolding of the process.

And this is a great example of what we were talking about earlier, of, I read that and I was like, What does that have to do with the things that I do? What does that have to do with cosmology? And that really helped me understand that I should be thinking of Black history and cosmic history in conversation with each other, that cosmic history is Black history. If I want to ask the question of where do Black people come from? What are our origins? That actually, part of that story is the Big Bang story, is cosmic inflation, is the formation of the first hydrogen atoms and stars and gas and, and all of those things.

And then I started to notice these things, like I talk about this Big K.R.I.T. song “My Sub Pt. 3,” and I, I, and I also talk about his song “Life,” where he kind of narrates the formation of Southern hip-hop as happening as, as part of the sequence of the Big Bang, but also thinking of the Big Bang as a metaphor for the for-, for the formation of Southern hip-hop. Those things were kind of all coming together for me, I think, because of Sylvia Wynter and this one comment she had made about how we narrate ourselves into existence.

Sarah: And then in the process of asking, Where do Black people come from? Where do I come from? What am I, what am I molecularly made of? That is also part of a narrative, because you have to be able to tell the story of where it started and how it got to you. And, and like you were saying with the idea that we are part of a continual movement of time, it’ll continue after us.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.

Sarah: So the narrative keeps going.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I think it was interesting to be finalizing this book and, like, doing the, the final draft before copyedits and then really, like, the copyedits and then there’s the first pass pages, the second pass pages, and I was really revising fairly heavily until –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – the third pass. Then they were like, You can’t do anything. Don’t do anything. Stop it.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And even the second pass pages, you’re not allowed to change pagination, so everything is like counting characters, which makes heavy Twitter use at one point very useful, actually?

Sarah: Oh my gosh, yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.

Sarah: It is so useful! [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: When – ‘cause you just have an intuition for, like, how many characters is –

Sarah: Yep!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – is, is, is that going to take up. But it was interesting doing all of this during the year that Sinners came out. And everybody was kind of thinking through the scene towards the middle with the piercing of the spiritual veil –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – where people are doing what Amiri Baraka called rhythm traveling, where people are traveling through, time traveling through the music. And so you see the past, present, and future of Black music kind of all in, in one place together, and not just Black music and dance, but also Chinese culture and dance from a very specific – I think it was the Tainan region that was, was being represented there. And so it was interesting to kind of think about the way in which this was also kind of being enacted in, in the story that I was trying to tell?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – without going, being like, I’m just going to add a whole ‘nother chapter to the book about Sinners.

And the other thing is, is that I’m actually, I’m working on a third book that I’ve been simultaneously under contract for, an academic book with Duke University Press called The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic, and, where –

Sarah: That’s another good title! Holy cow –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah!

Sarah: – that’s a good title! [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I think, based on your questions, I think you’re, you’re actually going to – hopefully, if I, I don’t fuck it up, you will like that book.

Sarah: Oh, bring it! I’m ready.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so I was also thinking about these two books at the same time and what belonged in which book. And in my mind, the two books are a pair, that they go together.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Also, I guess I kind of think of them along with my first book, The Disordered Cosmos, as being kind of a trilogy in a way.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And in that first book, I actually spent a lot of time thinking about these questions about metaphors and Blackness in, in relation to physics, and I have a whole chapter, “The Physics of Melanin,” in, in, in that book that’s very specifically, literally about the molecular makeup of, of melanin and the way it interacts with light and these kinds of nerdy questions that you can ask about it. I will say one of the hard things was, how do I continue those thoughts with readers that may not have read the first book –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – but without repeating myself, particularly for the readers who did read that first book. And there were some places there were overlap. Like, Gravity Girl is actually from the first book.

Sarah: Yes, yes, I knew that. You know, I read a lot of series, there’s a lot of really long series in romances, and, like, in later books, you’ll get, like, all the previous characters, they come out for a ball, ‘cause you want to see how they’re all doing! I, I –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I’m working on Twilight right now, actually, so – [laughs]

Sarah: Yes. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of re-, re-, rehashing and, you know, As you know, Bob –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.

Sarah: – the vampires did the da-da-da-da.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] Right!

Sarah: I think it’s totes cool to repeat yourself. Just, I mean, assume that it’s me and also that I am forgetful because I’m perimenopausal. So – [laughs] –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right.

Sarah: – just drop it in –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Fair!

Sarah: – wherever it works. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right. Right, right, right. Yes.

Sarah: So I watched an interview with you from 2016 while I was doing my, you know, research for this interview on Hot 97, which was very cool, very cool interview!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] Yes.

Sarah: And you mentioned at the time, if I’m remembering correctly, that there were less than a hundred Black female astrophysicists at the time?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I will say it’s actually, it was worse than that. It was actually, at the time there were under a hundred Black women who had earned PhDs in physics and related fields in the United States.

Sarah: Oh, I did write that down wrong. Thank you. Still, holy crap.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: The number for astronomy and astrophysics at that point was even worse. I think it was under twenty? And I think now we’re like somewhere in maybe the twenties, thirties, maybe?

Sarah: I was just about to ask, is that still the case? Are there still passingly few Black, Black women scientists?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, so in physics, there are now over a hundred Black women in North America and, who have earned their PhDs in physics and related fields. I think the number’s probably around one-twenty, one-thirty at this point? To sit-, that has to be situated in context, because I think somebody doesn’t work in the field, you’re like, Well, I don’t know if that’s a big number or a small number. It’s probably a small number ‘cause it involves Black women in a racist country, but to situate that in context, for the last few decades there have been two thousand PhDs in physics granted in the United States every year –

Sarah: Oh!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and half of them have gone to US citizens.

Sarah: Oh boy.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So, and there are not a ton of students, particularly Black women students, coming from Africa. Not zero, but not a ton; not many coming from Europe, either, or Latin America. There are a few, but not, not a ton. And so you’re really talking about, in the, in, between 1972, when the first Black woman ever earned her PhD in physics, and 2022, when we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary, you’re talking, you know, tens of thousands of PhDs in physics being granted, and just around a hundred of them going to Black women in fifty years.

Sarah: That is staggering.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: And I’m sure that, that adds to your efforts to connect with more people to bring them into the field. I hope – I, I, I would bet that a lot of people will read this book and be like, Oh, hang on, this is cool. Like, I remember you saying on the Hot 9- –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Fingers crossed! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, fingers crossed. I remember you saying in the Hot 97 interview that you were like, Wait, you can think about black holes as your job?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes! Yes!

Sarah: Which is, which, which related to, which very resonated with me, ‘cause I was like, Wait a minute, I can think about and talk about romance novels as my job?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes!

Sarah: I mean, I made up my job, but it’s true!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Sarah: It’s true!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: But you did!

Sarah: I did! Yeah!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: You, you made it up, and you’re still doing it two decades later! It’s, like, incredible!

Sarah: No one is as surprised as me. Every, every time I file my annual report with the state of Maryland, I’m like, still here! Still here!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Ha-ha! Can’t stop me! I hope that you-can’t-stop-me energy infuses anyone who is Black and interested in this field, because that number is just jaw-dropping.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, it’s – you know, as I was thinking about the numbers, I, I was answering your question, I almost said, And those numbers, the rate at which people are starting to get their PhDs was starting to grow, and it’s about to drop precipitously –

Sarah: Oh yes, very much so.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – because of the funding cuts to science. I mean, the first thought, I think, for people is like the cuts to, to anything that can be categorized as DEI, but –

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – at a fundamental level, the cuts to science broadly, regardless of identity – for example, I, I’m a professor in a PhD-granting program, and I think maybe for the first time in the department’s history since it became a PhD-granting department, we did not accept PhD students for, we did not accept an entering class for next academic year.

Sarah: Oh wow.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And departments around the country made this decision, not because the university told us we couldn’t, but because we decided the fiscally responsible thing to do by the students that we currently have –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – was to not make more financial commitments. And the hope is – I mean, I can’t, I, I can’t say anything about internal discussions, but certainly my hope, I will say, is that this is a temporary pause. But –

Sarah: God, I hope so. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – the extent to which it’s temporary will really depend on how science funding shifts. My department has a huge space science research component, so the changes at NASA have been particularly damaging?

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And people might be saying, like, Oh, this is really – like, I’m saying this – it’s impacting us as physicists; it’s impacting the next generation of scientists. The long view of that is if you don’t train PhD students in 2026, that means in 2046, you don’t have a cohort of faculty.

Sarah: Nope.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And In 2046, you don’t have a cohort of faculty, and so even if you decide that you want to start training PhD students again, you don’t have people to do that training, because we’re apprenticeship system.

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And then you say, Okay, well, the way we’re going to solve this problem is by importing foreign talent and asking people to come to the United States and train our students. But the problem is, is that nobody fucking trusts you anymore –

Sarah: No!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – because the country just went through –

Sarah: Why would you come over here? [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – a moment where you just stuck people in concentration camps for walking down the fucking street, right?

Sarah: Right. Or you just kidnapped, you know, whole-ass scholars off the street for wearing a head scarf. Like, no, absolutely not! That’s, that’s, that’s not fiscally responsible; that’s, like, human irresponsible.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Exactly.

Sarah: [Laughs] Good Lord!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So I think people need to appreciate that the damage is not something –

Sarah: No.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – it is something that there will have to be, like, very intensive and careful thought about how we are going to fix this, to the extent –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that it can be fixed.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And it does involve throwing money at the problem, but it is also going to involve some serious diplomacy that, I think people are going to need to push their elected – even if we get elected officials who are favorable to funding science – that sometimes they are not, the opposition party is not always good about fixing what has been previously broken.

Sarah: You don’t say.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: To, to put it mildly, right.

Sarah: You don’t say.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And, and so I think there is an element of that.

Sarah: That was a very precise understatement.

[Laughter]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And I think the other piece of it is that, you know, when you go – I don’t know how many of the listeners know this, but if you go to NASA’s website and find an image of, like, the Andromeda galaxy or something like that, any image that’s been taken with the NASA space telescope is public domain.

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: The only requirement is that you have to give credit, but as long as you give credit, you can use it for anything. This is, like, part of the gift of, like, your tax dollars is you can make art with it, you can put it on TV, you can stick it in Star Trek, as people have done a bajillion times. And the people who make those images look that way are skilled outreach people who think about what are the colors that we should – it’s, it’s actually a hard process. It’s not, it doesn’t come out of the telescope like that. And a lot of those people have been fired. And –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that expertise is something that will be hard to recover also. So anyway –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – sorry, that’s my mini rant. [Laughs]

Sarah: No, listen, I’m here for it.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It, it, it makes me want to shake people. Like, you do not understand the talent that is in federal service. These are people who are typically getting paid lower, with incredible amounts of expertise, because of the service element, and you are just letting them go. You are just dismissing them entirely. Like, what the hell?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: It’s just, and there are people who were at the age with NASA where they could retire but weren’t retiring –

Sarah: Mm-mm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – but those people –

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – are not coming back into the workforce –

Sarah: No.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – even if next year they announce, like, an incredible jobs – I mean, I do think that there will be some people who are simply like, It is my, my national duty, my human duty –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – to, to come back and help rebuild what has been broken.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: But there are going to be so many people who are just like, I don’t fuck with you guys. I don’t trust you not to put me out in the street tomorrow. Like –

Sarah: No! Like, seriously!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right.

Sarah: I also noticed on your bio that you were a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which was dissolved in October of last year.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: On Yom Kippur!

Sarah: Oh, fuck off! Really?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I just want to say, I was, like, offline praying, the whole thing. I opened up my email –

Sarah: As a person who is also Jewish, I am deeply offended! Oh my God!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yes! I opened my email and it was like – and the wild thing is, is that they didn’t actually say that we were – you know, this is, like, technically a special employee position, so I was unpaid, but I was employed by the federal government.

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And so basically I was being fired, but they don’t actually – they just sent us an email saying, Thank you for your service? But it didn’t actually say Your service is no longer required? And there was no explanation of Actually, this committee is being dissolved, and actually, the first meeting of the replacement – we could get into it, but yeah, it was, it was a bizarre end to, I have spent over, almost five, I spent over five years doing –

Sarah: Wow.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – a lot of policy work on the national level.

Sarah: That was going to be my question: What did this –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – advisory panel do? Because I know that –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Oh yes.

Sarah: – this administration is screwing with the advisory panels of everything that you’ve never heard of as an ordinary citizen. Like, now we’re going to get a gold coin because they screwed with the committee that advises the mint.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right!

Sarah: Like, for God’s sake. So what did this advisory panel do?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, so high energy physics is a term, I should just say, is a, is a synonym for particle physics, basically.

Sarah: Ohhh, cool!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: It’s an old school, because it used to be like you were doing things at high energy, you were accelerating particles to high energy and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – colliding them with targets, and so this is where high energy comes from? And particle physics kind of descends from nuclear physics, and there is low energy nuclear physics. So that’s a little bit of where the nomenclature is. There’s some quantum gravity person who’s like, I can’t believe she didn’t say it was also quantum gravity. So…

Sarah: I assure you, the quantum gravity folks are absolutely on this podcast. They –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I’m sorry to the –

Sarah: – mad romance readers.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – romance and quantum gravity Smart Bitches. I apologize.

Sarah: I’m going to get an email: Excuse me, Sarah, I actually am; she was right.

[Laughter]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Right!

So for almost sixty years – I think next year would have been the sixtieth anniversary of the panel, if I, if I remember correctly?

Sarah: Boy, that’s a long time!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: This was a panel, it was a FACA committee, so it followed very specific rules that the work had to be done in public. You couldn’t do things behind closed doors. It’s governed by federal law, and this committee was a panel of experts who were appointed to advise the executive branch and specifically the president on policy that related to high energy physics.

Sarah: Oh boy.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And, so to give a concrete example of what this meant, HEPAP, which is what we called the, the, the panel, every decade or so would appoint a sub panel called the P5. So let me see if I can get this: the particle physics priorities prioritization panel [Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel]. So –

Sarah: Whoooa!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – there’s supposed to be five Ps in there. I can never get – but that was the P5 –

Sarah: With pi-, pizza, with pizza.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: With pizza.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And the P5 people would come together and write a report that basically said, These are what the fiscal priorities should be for the next ten to twenty years of particle physics.

Sarah: Oh boy.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: These are the experiments that the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy should fund. This is the hierarchy of, this one’s the most important, this one’s the second most important. And they would do funding schema of like, if Congress allocates this number of funds, this is what your project landscape will look like. And this was functionally treated as binding. And so this was, like, how decisions were made of, like, the direction that American particle physics went in. And the P5 report was written in conversation with something called the Snowmass report. This is like a Russian nesting doll of – so the Snowmass report was a bunch of, was, is a, is a long – like, I don’t know how, I think it might have been thousand pages, the last one that we wrote – where the entire particle physics community –

Sarah: Oh!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – gets together and says, This is the science that we have recently accomplished. This is the science we could accomplish. These are the kinds of projects that we think we should be doing. And anybody could submit a white paper advocating for it. The white papers would be publicly available. And then there were basically captains who were in charge of different topics? And would write up a summation of This is, like, what we gleaned from the papers. We’re using our expertise.

So there are hundreds of people involved in this process. So HEPAP is basically kind of the end stage of the entire community. It was our responsibility to make sure that this process happened? I was also, I was one of the captains. I was one of the three people in charge of making the case for probing the properties of dark matter using astrophysical techniques. And so what I had done is I had worked as the, this captain, co-captain for Snowmass. We were successful in the last P5 report. Our stuff got very high ranked. And basically that P5 report is being thrown out by the Trump administration.

And in the, in between that, I was appointed to a national academies decadal committee that was tasked with thinking about particle physics fifty years from now. And so that was, like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – service that I did in between. And everything that I worked on for the last five years in terms of helping to set policy has just – I mean, I’m smiling because, like, it’s that or you cry.

Sarah: What else are you going to do if you, if you don’t, like –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: – laugh at the absurdity? You’re just going to start screaming. That’s ghastly!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, I mean, it, it’s – I realize it’s, like, a lot of detail, and it sounds very insider baseball, but I think it’s really – when we were working on the Snowmass report, the people who read these things are congressional staffers.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: The people who staff the Senate energy committee, the Senate science committee –

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – the Senate climates committee.

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: They read, they read the reports that these panels put together –

Sarah: Right.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and then they summarize them for their bosses, and then their –

Sarah: Yep.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – bosses go out onto the floor of the Senate and say X, Y, and Z.

Sarah: Yep!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So this was one of the –

Sarah: You were informing government directly.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: We were informing governance! Like, how the country was governed, how policy was set for science, including, for example, the broader impacts criterion at the National Science Foundation, which are hardwired into the law, no matter what those guys with their little ChatGPT throwing people’s applications out say. You are required to have a broader impact in order to get National Science Foundation funding –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and it is in, the America COMPETES Act renewed something that was in a prior law that was passed under Obama that specifically says promoting the participation of traditionally underrepresented minorities meets the criterion for broader impact. So every single time these guys throw out an application that does that, they are breaking the law. And that is something that scientists had advocated for and social scientists had advocated to be written into the law. So –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – this is – so it was wild because, like, when I signed up to write this book – just to bring it back to The Edge of Space-Time – when I signed up to write this book, what I thought I was doing in part was making, was kind of joining and making the case to the public for the science that we were writing about in these reports.

Sarah: Yeah!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And then as I’m editing the book, it is becoming this desperate plea for Don’t throw out this way of looking at the universe because they, the authoritarians are telling you to, to stop looking at the universe and are telling us to stop thinking about it, and fuck them. You need to keep looking.

Sarah: Yes. Yes, yes you do. Which leads me, actually, to my next question: what do you think about when you look at the sky at night? I know you talked about having your telescope out.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: What do you think about when you look at the sky? What does the sky say to you?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So I do a lot – as you know, ‘cause I write about this in the book – I do astrophotography –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – when the weather here in New England allows. It’s called –

Sarah: Which is like, what, three and a half, maybe four days.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Couple of hours.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I mean, I will say I did not get one observing night in this winter. And –

Sarah: Ugh!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I’m pretty – I’m torn about it, because also we didn’t get any snow last year, which wigged me the fuck out for other reasons?

Sarah: Oh yeah. No, we got all the snow, and then now the West doesn’t have the snow. With, this is, I –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, right.

Sarah: I was saying – my husband and I both snowboard – I’m like, Just, everyone needs to have snow. Could we just have snow for everyone? Everyone needs their snow.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Everybody…So I am very happy about the snow, but it did mean I couldn’t take my telescopes out. So I’m an, I do astrophotography, partly because, you know, being in New Hampshire, it’s not as light-polluted as if I was in Boston full time? But it is the case that it’s still pretty light-polluted up here. And the cool thing about doing astrophotography is it allows you to see things with a camera that you can’t quite see with the naked eye, because –

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – it takes all of the light signal and adds it together over time so that it becomes stronger.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So often what I’m doing when I’m taking the telescope out and I’m setting it up and I’m testing to make sure that I’ve oriented everything correctly, and I often do this when it’s cold because I get skeeters, and so the mosquitoes and I do not get along in the summer. So when I’m, when I’m outside, like, and I’m looking, I’m often, like, looking – so the last round of big imaging I did was of the Andromeda galaxy, which is our nearest major neighbor. And the Milky Way is eventually going to, people like to say collide – that’s a particular metaphor – with, with Andromeda. It’s not going to be violent. It is more going to be a dance of stars and dark matter relocating and, and reconfiguring.

Sarah: An encounter!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: An encounter. I think that’s a –

Sarah: Yes.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – that’s a really good word; we should, we should say encounter. And so I’m looking and I can’t quite see Andromeda with my naked eye here. There are places where you could go where it’s dark enough you could see Andromeda. And I’m looking at it, and I’m actually just staring at what, where the telescope is pointed and saying, Andromeda is there. I’m looking at it. That’s actually part of it, is looking at the sky and seeing what’s not there.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And, and, and that’s an act of imagination? It’s also an act of faith? And there’s something, like, kind of incredible about, like, I know Andromeda is there. I can have that confidence that Andromeda is there.

Sarah: Yeah.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And when I go inside and open my laptop that the images the computer on the telescope send, are sending to it, I’m going to see Andromeda, and it’s not going to be something I downloaded off of NASA’s site. It’s going to be something that I pushed the button, I put everything together – I didn’t build the telescope, but I did attach it to the mount – [laughs] – and I attached the camera to it.

Sarah: Listen, just attaching, getting the one tech to talk to the other tech? That’s like, that’s like high level support there.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Especially, I’m a theoretical physicist, right? And so the running joke is that, like, you don’t –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – we don’t build. In fact, so two of my best friends are telescope builders, and one of them, my friend Nick, was absolutely like, when I started sending him pictures like, Oh, I got into astrophotography; I’ve started putting telescopes and cameras together. He was like, I don’t believe you.

[Laughter]

Sarah: He didn’t. [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: And he was just like, he was absolutely like, Chanda, really? And then he was like, Oh, this is so cool. Now we can do research together. And I was like, I am not that good. I’m just like a little baby out here with my toys. It’s probably going to stay there.

Sarah: I’m just taking the pics, man. It’s okay.

I always ask this question: what books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Oh my God, what books am I not reading? I’m just, like, looking at my desk and I’m like…

Sarah: Listen, I just need you to know that this week I was reading your book about space-time and an anthology called Here for All the Reasons: Why We Watch The Bachelor? My brain was so happy, oh my God.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: What a week to be reading a book about The Bachelor –

Sarah: I am –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – and that entire franchise! [Laughs]

Sarah: – interviewing the editors of that anthology on Sunday, and I really did have to rewrite a lot of my questions. Yep!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Oh man. I feel like if you ever want to have an episode where you talk about Unreal, I’m just going to shoot my shot and say bring me back. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, hang on. I’m writing that down. Unreal is like, oh my God, it’s so good.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I love that show! I love that show!

Sarah: I am writing this down. I will reach out. Hang on. Okay, show idea: done. Boom.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: So one of the books that I’m really excited about is called Cat Love by Tomás Q. Morin? And the reason that I’m excited about this book is because it riffs off of Moby Dick in its opening? So this is coming out in June. But I now know why, like, my editor just sent it to me with a note that was like, I think you will like this book. And I opened it, I read the first few lines, and I was like, Well, she knows I’m obsessed with Moby Dick and this book riffs off Moby Dick. She also knows that my friends and I love cats, and –

Sarah: Yes!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – so it’s literally called Cat Love. So that’s a book that I’m, I’m, I’m pretty excited to be reading.

I’ve also been reading Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar’s book First Light: Kanaka ‘Oiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a Wakea? And –

Sarah: Wow!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I guess I haven’t talked about it publicly because I’m reviewing the book, but Iokepa’s work is work that I’ve been following for a really long time. And it’s weird to read a book that is about a movement that you were a part of and watched unfold? I’ve never had that experience before. So that has been a really interesting journey. It’s a book I definitely recommend. I’m reviewing it for an academic journal, so I don’t think I’m breaking any rules by saying that. [Laughs] But –

Sarah: Well, I personally will not tell anyone –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs] Yeah, okay.

Sarah: – except the whole internet.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I, thank you to all the Smart Bitches who are just going to keep their mouths shut. [Laughs]

Sarah: No one’s saying a word. We won’t, we won’t, no, no, no, we will not tell.

I always end every episode with a bad joke that I usually do in the outro, but I actually have a physics particle joke that I found, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, but I wanted to tell it to you anyway, ‘cause it’s really bad –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Okay.

Sarah: – it’s so bad.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I’m excited.

Sarah: What did the Higgs boson say when it walked into a Catholic church?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I don’t know; what did it say?

Sarah: You cannot have mass without me!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: [Laughs]

Sarah: Isn’t that so bad?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: I actually – I don’t think that I’ve heard that one before, but that’s…

Sarah: [Laughs]

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Can I, can I say a little bit about why the joke works for –

Sarah: Yes, please! I was hoping you would, because I was like, wait, I understand this is funny, but I had to look it up!

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Well, so, first of all, I appreciate that, like, you know what the Higgs is, right? Which is like, I think one of the goals – people come to science books and they think, Oh, I need to have everything memorized at the end, and I think sometimes people don’t want to read science books ‘cause they think there will be a test at the end? And really the only test is like, did you find it interesting? And if you heard that word, would you say, I’ve heard of a neutrino before? I don’t need you to be able to explain what a neutrino is, even though, like, if you got that obsessed with it, that you can, that’s cool too.

In the case of the Higgs, the Higgs is a particle that was actually detected in an experiment for the first time in 2012. It had been long hypothesized, and it is the particle that we are fairly certain gives most other particles – visible particles, so not dark matter – their mass. So this is what the Higgs is. It is the case that we don’t think the Higgs gives neutrinos their mass, and that’s actually kind of a mystery. Non-trinary neutrinos.

Sarah: Interesting. Huh! So somebody else is giving them mass.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. There’s some, so we think, so – I called them non, non-trinary neutrinos; now I have to explain what I mean by that. Neutrinos come in three flavors, electron neutrino, tau neutrino, and muon neutrino. And as they’re flying through space and time, they will randomly change flavors. So they might be created as an electron neutrino, and then whenever they arrive at a detector, it might be a tau or a muon neutrino. So they’re non-trinary, and this is called a neutrino oscillation. And we think that neutrino oscillations are related to how neutrinos get their mass, but it’s actually an open question that people are working on right now.

Sarah: That’s so cool! Oh, I’m glad I found that, found that bad joke. [Laughs] Where –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: That’s good; I’m going to use it.

Sarah: Please do! Where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah, so people can find me on Instagram at chanda.prescod.weinstein. You can also find me on Bluesky at chanda.blacksky.app. I’m also on Threads at the same Instagram, and my website is chanda.science. And you can buy my newsletter at news.chanda.science. So many different locations!

Sarah: I will link to all of these things. That is what it’s like to be an author on the internet: I am in my own body and nine different places online that I must keep up with. It’s like having nine properties where you have to mow the lawn all the time.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah.

Sarah: Thank you so, so much for doing this interview. I’ve had the best time. I really enjoyed your book, and I really appreciate you taking the time to not only explain in the book what you do, but also explain to me some of the things you’re working on. I think this is so. Cool. So thank you for sharing everything that’s going on in your brain.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: Thank you so much for having me. It was actually a really exciting invitation, so –

Sarah: Oh, I’m so –

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein: – I’m, I’m happy to come back whenever you need me.

Sarah: Oh, I will, I will, I will, I will abuse that, actually. [Laughs]

[outro]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I cannot thank Dr. Prescod-Weinstein enough for making time for me. She is doing a lot of press to promote this book. It’s out as of now in the US and will be out very shortly in the UK. I think Australia, your, your copies are coming in August.

But I, I mean it when I say that I found this book very humbling, but also very nourishing. It is very reassuring to think of myself as one element of an endless inflation that started before me and will continue after me, and that our existence as individuals in the universe is a miracle. So I hope you will check out this book. It was truly incredible. My brain was growing at the time.

There are links to where you can find Dr. Prescod-Weinstein and where you can find all of the articles and books that we mentioned in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast under episode 714.

Now, I have already told a terrible joke, and so now this episode will come to an end.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week. And in the words of my favorite retired podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening. You’re welcome for talking!

And remember: your existence is a miracle.

[end of music]