Chanda Prescod‑Weinstein on physics, poetry and pop culture | Science Quickly Podcast

0:00 I’m not saying you throw out your everyday experience,

0:03 but I’m saying there’s a universe beyond what you

0:06 have been told through your everyday life to imagine.

0:10 And I think also saying to people, “Hey, look,

0:11 if what everybody else says is really intuitive

0:13 about everyday life doesn’t feel intuitive to you,

0:15 maybe this weird stuff, like the fact that particles are nonbinary,

0:19 will feel more intuitive to you.

0:21 Chanda Prescod-Weinstein,

0:25 thank you so much for joining me today for Science Quickly.

0:27 To talk about your latest book, The Edge of Space-Time.

0:31 I am so excited to talk to you about

0:33 all of my biggest and weirdest physics questions today,

0:36 but I wanted to start off with the poetry that you talk about in this book.

0:41 You say that when physics is at its best, it’s very poetic.

0:45 How is physics poetic to you?

0:47 I mean, I think the universe is poetic.

0:50 There’s something really beautiful and elegant, particularly for me,

0:53 as a theoretical physicist, how all the pieces come together.

0:57 There’s a poetry to that.

1:00 There’s a rhythm to it and—rhythm and patterns, right?

1:04 So I think what we do in physics

1:06 is look for patterns and try and establish patterns.

1:09 And poetry is often very pattern-based,

1:11 whether you’re talking about meter or the structure of the poem on the page.

1:16 So I see a lot of links.

1:18 Yeah, I mean, this book really connects a lot of different subjects

1:21 in science and then brings them all to the center in physics.

1:25 But one that I thought was really interesting is there’s a lot of history

1:27 in this book and a lot of history that I didn’t know about.

1:31 There’s a lot of people that you talk about as being the first

1:34 in their field or newly realized as the first in their field.

1:38 And so I wanted to ask you about Mozi from the Zhou kingdom.

1:42 So I should start by saying I didn’t come into the book thinking,

1:45 “I’m gonna write about Zhou kingdom philosophers from, you know,

1:49 before China was established,” and so even figuring out,

1:53 “How do I talk about this?” because the reference point

1:56 is going to be—this is stuff that’s written in ancient Chinese.

2:00 And as I was writing about Newton’s laws and trying to figure out,

2:05 “How do I make Newton’s laws interesting

2:07 to me?” ’cause I actually hated frosh physics.

2:10 I did not enjoy it.

2:11 It wasn’t my jam.

2:12 I was someone who was, like, really hype about quantum mechanics,

2:15 quantum physics, general relativity, that kind of thing.

2:18 And in doing some research I saw a little

2:22 note somewhere that actually this philosopher from the Zhou kingdom,

2:26 Mozi, had come up with one of Newton’s laws,

2:31 like, a millennium before Newton had.

2:33 And so I chased this down,

2:36 it was a real moment of synergy of understanding how much we in the sciences

2:41 depend on the humanities because someone had

2:43 taken the time to do the translation.

2:45 And it just opened this whole world

2:47 to me of people asking these questions about “How

2:50 do I explain the difference between extent

2:53 in space and duration in time?” and the different

2:56 ways that these people who lived very close to the land and in a different

3:02 way were trying to have these conversations

3:05 with themselves about the difference between space and time,

3:07 or maybe the lack of difference between space and time.

3:10 Yeah, I mean, as you say in the book,

3:12 we have been looking to the stars since there were stars,

3:15 since we were able to look at them.

3:17 I mean, it’s something that has always inspired

3:19 us and also helped us reflect on ourselves,

3:22 which I thought was really interesting ’cause physics can

3:25 be kind of intimidating to people as a field,

3:28 but it’s also very philosophical and poetic,

3:30 as you’re saying, and it can be really exciting.

3:33 It can also be pretty funny.

3:34 I mean, I laughed out loud at a few lines in this book,

3:37 and, and physics does not normally...

3:39 Nailed it!

3:39 Make me laugh, I have to say.

3:42 But I mean, you open the book with a Star Trek quote,

3:45 and I counted at least four Star Trek

3:47 generations and one Star Trek movie, the whale one.

3:50 So I wanted to ask you about Star

3:52 Trek inspiring your interest in physics and what

3:55 in Star Trek do you think is the most

3:58 interesting physics conundrum they kind of play with?

4:01 So I will say that I hate time-travel stories usually.

4:04 I struggle with them because it’s hard to make them logical.

4:08 The time loops are always really difficult.

4:10 Actually, one of the Star Trek films that I really love

4:12 that I don’t talk about in the book is Star Trek: First Contact.

4:15 Mm.

4:16 And that one is a time-travel film that involves, basically,

4:22 these socialist utopians from the future going into the past

4:26 to make sure that their socialist utopian future happens.

4:29 Mm-hmm.

4:30 And I think that that’s politically a really interesting film.

4:35 It’s a film that engages a lot with one of my favorite novels, Moby-Dick.

4:39 I’m completely obsessed with Moby-Dick.

4:40 That one film actually highlights for me a lot

4:42 of the power of Star Trek, which is,

4:44 it’s about our relationships with each other,

4:46 about how we envision who we are going to be to each other in the future.

4:50 So I think a lot of people think of it as, like, “Oh, that’s science fiction.

4:53 It’s about technology.

4:54 It’s about, what, traveling faster than the speed of light,

4:57 which I don’t think is ever gonna happen.” So I think in a lot of ways that’s,

5:01 like, the least interesting thing about the film and the franchise.

5:06 I think the most interesting thing is the way that they organize science

5:09 being done and that humans have

5:13 transformed ourselves into a species of peaceful,

5:18 curious people who go out into the cosmos,

5:21 make sure that everybody’s basic needs are taken care of, make

5:25 sure that we have ways of interacting with species that are

5:29 new to us that are respectful and honor our values

5:33 while also honoring the values that may be new to us.

5:38 And for me that’s really a guiding way of thinking about,

5:41 if I am going to ask questions of what science as a community should be,

5:45 that I think Star Trek is, for me, my guiding light in thinking about,

5:49 “How do I want scientists to be with each other,

5:51 and how do I want scientists to be in society?” And I think that Star

5:55 Trek does a good job of representing that society that I want to be in.

5:58 Yeah, I mean, you talk about a few specific Star Trek episodes.

6:02 Not to pivot too far away from Star Trek,

6:04 ’cause I could stay here all day and just talk

6:07 to you about that, but you’ve said before that Vera C.

6:10 Rubin has asked you about the dark matter problem.

6:13 She asked you, “How do you think we should solve the dark matter problem?” One,

6:17 congratulations on being able to speak with her—that’s incredible.

6:20 But also, what is the problem, and have you solved it yet?

6:23 I was very lucky that I got to meet

6:27 her at a Women in Astronomy conference in 2009.

6:30 I was a graduate student—like,

6:33 I didn’t realize Vera Rubin was even gonna be there.

6:36 And then someone introduced me to her, and the very

6:39 first thing she says to me is,

6:40 “So how do you think we should solve the dark matter

6:43 problem?” And at that point I was working on cosmic acceleration;

6:46 that’s what my dissertation was about.

6:48 Mm-hmm.

6:48 I had no prepared answer for that.

6:51 And I was really sitting there, like, panicking.

6:53 I have no idea what I said.

6:56 Whatever I said, she was super gracious about it,

6:57 and I got the opportunity to spend more time.

7:00 I had lunch with her, and we actually went to the White House together to talk

7:04 about women and girls in astronomy

7:06 in the first year of the first Obama administration.

7:10 And the White House Council on Women and Girls and Tina

7:13 Tchen had invited us to come talk to them about these issues.

7:16 So that’s kind of the context for my experience in meeting with Vera Rubin.

7:21 As a postdoc I went on to start working on it,

7:23 and I think one of the reasons that I felt like,

7:26 “Okay, this is a problem I can tackle,” is

7:28 that Vera Rubin had literally been part of the team, along with Kent Ford,

7:32 that proved to the astronomy community

7:35 that most of the normally gravitating matter

7:38 in the universe is completely invisible to us—it’s what we call dark matter.

7:43 And she had basically said,

7:44 “This is a problem that’s open for you to think about.

7:46 This is a problem that’s open for you to solve.” And so

7:49 when the opportunity came around for me to start working on it,

7:53 I started working on it partly because I needed something to do;

7:56 I needed to get publications.

7:58 But I think it felt open to me in a way

8:01 because of that question that she had asked me.

8:03 I should hedge on whether we have figured out

8:06 what dark matter is or not because it may be

8:09 that there’s a publication sitting on the archive or in a journal

8:12 right now that has the right model in it...

8:15 Mm-hmm.

8:15 And we haven’t proven that that’s the correct model.

8:18 It could be that it’s the axion, which is the hypothetical particle that I

8:22 work on and my research group works on.

8:24 Mm-hmm.

8:25 I don’t know.

8:26 We’re still waiting for data.

8:28 Some of the data that I think is gonna help us

8:30 with this question is actually coming back from the Vera C.

8:33 Rubin Observatory that is taking its first steps into observation right now.

8:39 I think that that, paired with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,

8:43 which is launching later this year,

8:44 that we’re gonna get a lot of insight into galaxy structure.

8:48 And we know that dark matter dominates most galaxies.

8:53 So the visible part of the galaxy is actually just

8:56 a small fraction of the total matter and mass that’s there.

9:00 And so we’re gonna be looking at all of this new galaxy data,

9:04 also from the ESA’s Euclid telescope, to get a sense of how galaxies are really

9:11 structured in more detail than we’ve ever seen before, and that’s very exciting.

9:14 JWST is also contributing to that.

9:17 The images from the Just Wonderful Space Telescope have been incredible.

9:21 Yeah.

9:22 I, actually, I wanted to ask you about cosmic acceleration

9:25 because you actually mention us in this book—January 1999 issue.

9:30 There’s a graphic in here that you have in this book.

9:40 It’s such a fascinating question in your field,

9:42 too, because, not to dumb it down too much, but why is that happening,

9:46 and why does it freak me out so much when I think about it?

9:50 So spacetime is expanding.

9:52 We know this already.

9:54 And this was something that had been known for decades.

9:56 And then when I was finishing up high school in the late ’90s,

10:01 two different groups making supernova observations and using

10:06 supernovae as basically ways of measuring distance

10:10 in the universe noticed that the numbers seemed

10:12 to be indicating that the expansion was picking up speed,

10:16 so cosmic acceleration is what we call it.

10:19 And we don’t know why.

10:24 I guess it depends on who you ask, right?

10:26 So I have friends who will say,

10:28 “Well, it’s obviously just a cosmological constant.

10:30 There’s a vacuum energy that is fundamental to the vacuum

10:34 that is causing it to pick up speed.

10:36 This works if you put it into Einstein’s equations.”

10:39 I find that to be a very unsatisfying answer.

10:42 As you know I rant about this a little bit in the book.

10:46 I mean, anytime someone in science says,

10:48 “Well, obviously, it’s this,” my hackles go up.

10:51 I have some...

10:52 Yeah.

10:52 Follow-up questions immediately ’cause is it really that obvious?

10:55 Has it been that obvious for that long?

10:57 And this feels like one of those questions in your field...

10:59 Yeah.

10:59 That the answer isn’t obvious.

11:01 We’re still wrestling with it.

11:03 It, it might be this.

11:04 We’re leaning towards a direction.

11:06 But we haven’t fully decided yet.

11:08 I do think this is a problem where, on paper,

11:12 the people who are saying it’s just a cosmological constant could be right.

11:17 The problem with that is then I need

11:20 you to explain to me why the cosmological constant,

11:24 that vacuum energy that’s associated with it—or dark energy,

11:27 as this problem is often called—where does that come from?

11:31 So you can answer that question by saying that, actually,

11:35 there are many different bubbles of spacetime,

11:37 and we happen to be in the bubble that has the value that it has,

11:41 and if it didn’t have the value that it has,

11:44 we probably wouldn’t exist to observe it,

11:47 which is—this is one version of what’s called the anthropic principle.

11:49 Yeah.

11:51 Which is—the way—I tried to state it in a way that doesn’t

11:53 make it sound like we’re at the center of the universe,

11:56 like we’re just kind of incidental to this phenomenon

11:59 and the entire thing is a coincidence.

12:02 Mm-hmm.

12:02 But then what an odd coincidence.

12:04 So this is known as the coincidence problem, right?

12:06 So even if you pick that solution,

12:09 which is very mathematically simple, relatively speaking,

12:11 it raises all kinds of questions that are

12:14 not just physical but also metaphysical questions.

12:17 Yeah, I mean, it seems like physics overall

12:19 and cosmology in your focus is by answering one question,

12:23 you have now created 100 more, and that’s part of the fun of it...

12:27 Yeah.

12:28 And that’s part of the adventure in the discovery of it there.

12:31 I mean, I have to say, I am not a physicist by training.

12:35 I’ve learned more physics in these pages

12:37 than any professional setting previously.

12:39 But I have to say, I felt really grounded and I felt like

12:43 I was really following someone who knew where we were going in this book.

12:47 And one of the things that really helped

12:49 me is all of these pop culture references.

12:51 I mean, I tried to count as many as I could,

12:54 but there’s so many comparisons that you make to pop culture.

12:57 I mean, we learn about symmetry through a Missy Elliott record, like, lyrics.

13:01 We learn about the concept of spacetime with Sun Ra.

13:04 I mean, we talk about Octavia Butler, Tracy K.

13:07 Smith, Big K.R.I.T, Mos Def, Insane Clown Posse,

13:10 Lewis Carroll, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan.

13:13 The Drake and Kendrick battle comes up in this book.

13:15 Drake should have quit earlier.

13:19 That’s all I’m gonna say about that.

13:19 What was your favorite reference to use

13:22 when explaining these kind of thorny physics problems to those of us who haven’t

13:26 spent our professional life studying the cosmos?

13:30 So in a lot of ways this book was very vulnerable

13:32 for me because it was welcoming people into my weird game-of-associations brain.

13:38 Yeah.

13:39 And so it was interesting for me as I was writing

13:42 to see what came up and what ideas came to me.

13:45 And I think if I had to pick, like,

13:48 a most-favorite one—in the chapter where I’m trying to explain quantum gravity,

13:52 so trying to figure out how we put

13:54 quantum mechanics into conversation with Einstein’s general relativity,

13:57 I was trying to explain the idea of small extra dimensions.

14:05 So beyond the three spatial dimensions we’re in, plus the one time dimension,

14:08 that there are these ideas in quantum

14:10 gravity where you add these small extra dimensions.

14:12 And the story that came to mind for me is one from Star Trek:

14:17 Discovery with Anthony Rapp as the engineer

14:20 Stamets and Wilson Cruz as his husband, Culber.

14:24 Mm-hmm.

14:24 And it is this beautiful queer love story that was almost quite disastrously,

14:30 actually, like, another kind of trope of queer death.

14:35 And luckily, some people talked some sense into the production

14:40 writers’ room so that it doesn’t end that way.

14:44 But there is this moment where, spoiler alert,

14:47 Culber is trapped in these small extra dimensions, and Wilson Cruz being stuck

14:53 in those extra dimensions is so emotionally powerful.

14:58 And it was interesting for me to kind of learn about, I guess,

15:00 like, being in my own head of when I envision—when I’m thinking about,

15:03 “What are these small extra dimensions like?”

15:05 that that was the storyline that came to mind.

15:08 And I think a lot of the work that we do in science communicating and science

15:12 writing is trying to figure out how we

15:13 can take something that’s familiar to the reader

15:15 and use it to guide the reader to something that maybe is I think

16:16 the way that I think about this is also very shaped by queer of color theory,

16:20 in particular José Esteban Muñoz’s writing about queerness as futurity...

16:26 Mm-hmm.

16:26 In his book Cruising Utopia, which is—ostensibly, it’s a queer theory book.

16:33 It’s about gay sex.

16:34 It’s about lots of things.

16:36 But he really makes the point that queerness kind of lives at the bounds

16:41 of what we know and also lives at the bounds of our traditional sensibilities.

16:46 And reading Muñoz helped me think about,

16:49 “What are we doing in theoretical physics?” And I

16:52 started to realize that we’re also doing the same thing,

16:55 where we take people’s traditional notions about how the universe works,

17:00 just based on their everyday lives, and then,

17:03 as science writers in particular, we’re basically saying,

17:05 “I need you to shift that a little bit.” Mm.

17:08 I’m not saying you throw out your everyday experience,

17:11 but I’m saying there’s a universe beyond what you

17:15 have been told through your everyday life to imagine.

17:19 And I think also saying to people, “Hey, look,

17:22 if what everybody else says is really intuitive

17:25 about everyday life doesn’t feel intuitive to you, maybe this weird stuff,

17:29 like the fact that particles are nonbinary, will feel more intuitive to you,

17:34 like the fact that neutrinos are nontrinary.” They just randomly

17:39 oscillate between three different identities

17:40 as they’re flying through space, right?

17:44 Maybe that sounds odd to the average theoretical physicist,

17:47 but maybe that sounds completely natural to someone who

17:51 is nonbinary or is otherwise a gender dropout like myself.

17:55 So I think there’s a kind of richness there in saying,

18:00 “I want you to push beyond your senses,

18:02 and I want you to push beyond your sensibilities.” And there you can also hear,

18:07 I’m thinking with Jane Austen.

18:09 Mm-hmm.

18:09 Like, it’s all just right there.

18:12 So I have to ask you,

18:14 especially about pushing past our comfort zones—I’m gonna quote you to yourself.

18:18 You say at one point that “the Stern-Gerlach experiment absolutely ruined” you.

18:23 You say, “I am now one of those physicists who thinks that the problem

18:26 of quantum mechanics is not at all [solely] a question of philosophy.

18:30 I believe in the possibility that it’s a question of the physicist’s

18:33 failed literary imagination.” You start the book by talking about the benefits

18:38 and the pitfalls of metaphor and how physics is stuck using

18:41 metaphor because that’s how we have to understand things by comparing them,

18:46 but also there are limitations there.

18:49 Please tell me about this experiment, and then, two,

18:52 tell me how an experiment could have ruined you in this way.

18:57 So I—the Stern-Gerlach experiment, in some ways,

19:00 is kind of the core of the book,

19:03 where we assume that particles are going to have

19:07 a certain outcome in the experiment and they have a completely

19:11 different outcome that suggests that particles can only have certain

19:16 levels of energy and be in certain locations in an atom.

19:20 And so this is one of the first

19:22 major hints of quantization in experimental physics.

19:26 The part about Stern-Gerlach that I love is

19:27 that if you start to line up multiple

19:29 Stern-Gerlach experiments and you just change a little

19:33 bit what you’re measuring—you take a group of particles,

19:38 you measure this quantum property of the particle,

19:41 and you measure one aspect of it,

19:43 so let me say I’m choosing dimension one of the particle.

19:47 And then I send it through a different version

19:49 of the experiment that picks on dimension two of the particle.

19:53 I measure that.

19:54 It gives me information.

19:56 Then I send it through the first experiment, trying to measure one again.

19:59 The particles won’t remember what measurement they had in the first one.

20:05 So this becomes a problem immediately because I’ve just said

20:08 to you “remember.” What does it mean for a particle to remember?

20:12 Somehow it has information that it will no longer give me,

20:16 and this has something to do with the fact of observation.

20:19 And I don’t mean, like, person observation;

20:21 I mean that there is a measurement that is made.

20:25 So when I say this ruined me,

20:27 I think when I finally sat down to teach this experiment for the first time,

20:32 it forced me to reckon with the fact that these questions of “What

20:37 does quantum mechanics mean?” could not

20:39 just be pushed aside to the philosophers,

20:42 but this is something that we have a confrontation

20:45 with for the first time in the Stern-Gerlach experiment—which is also,

20:50 by the way, a very hard thing to explain without diagrams.

20:52 It’s actually a hard thing to explain with diagrams.

20:55 And—to the point where I was at a workshop last year while I was working

21:00 on the book with a group of theoretical physicists

21:03 who all work on particle physics in different ways.

21:05 And I was sitting there, and I was like,

21:07 “Yeah, so I’m writing this section on the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

21:09 I’m so excited about it.” And everybody just stopped and looked at me,

21:12 and they were like, “What are you doing?

21:13 Like, why would you put that in your book?

21:16 Nobody’s gonna get it.” And it’s entirely possible that that’s

21:19 a section of the book where people are like,

21:21 “I didn’t really get it.” I’m actually okay

21:23 if people struggle with it a little bit because

21:26 I also think what the Stern-Gerlach experiment highlights

21:30 for us is the value of struggling with physics.

21:36 And part of the point that I wanted to make with this book is

21:40 that struggling with physics is a politically

21:42 important thing to do for your mind, for you as an engaged civic participant.

21:49 And I think Stern-Gerlach is kind

21:50 of that place where all of that comes together.

21:53 It’s also the place where the math that you need to describe these issues

21:56 with the sequential experiment were forced out

21:59 of the math that Newtonian physics uses...

22:02 Mm-hmm.

22:02 And we have to expand beyond our sense of “This is

22:06 what we need.” Our tool kit has to grow.

22:08 And there’s something really awesome about seeing

22:11 that natural development come out of these observations.

22:15 Yeah, that is really beautiful, and thank you so much for writing this book.

22:19 Thank you for having me.

22:20 Thank you.