Scientists have to be brave, and they don’t come much braver than Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In her glorious book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime and Dreams Deferred, written in jaunty yet meticulous prose, she makes us fall in love with particle physics.
For this unique work of popular science, Dr Prescod-Weinstein was shortlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize (non-fiction), and today she takes part in the festival programme of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
This renowned, scientifically feisty African-American assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire is of Barbadian origin and is the step-granddaughter of Trinidad and Tobago’s outstanding philosopher and historian CLR James.
Like James, her father’s stepfather, her philosophical approach allowed her to see the big picture, so that although her deftly crafted book is about theoretical physics it is a deeply personal narrative in which the author takes us along with her in the task of illuminating the universe with reflections upon the fact that science is not neutral, it is shaped by society and politics, and that who is a scientist is determined by who one happens to be. She confidently allows herself to go where the societal and historical evidence takes her, and we end up with a unique expose about a world in which who can see, who can dream turns out to be a matter of urgent consideration.
The author argues, in response to her revealed theory, that everyone has a fundamental right to understand and experience the universe in all its beauty and complexity, not just the privileged.
The book was chosen five times as either best science book, best non-fiction book or best physics book, won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology and was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
This means that the very world she scrutinises and finds wanting accepts her analysis that like in most fields, science is riven by racism, misogyny and inequalities of race, gender, class, nationality and disability that lie deep in social, economic and academic structures.
[caption id="attachment_952292" align="alignnone" width="500"] Chanda Prescod-Weinstein -[/caption]
The first black woman to hold a tenure-track academic position in theoretical cosmology, she writes, “Physics and math classrooms are not only scenes of cosmology…but also scenes of society, complete with all of the problems that follow society wherever it goes. There is no escape.”
For her the only way forward is to create “room for black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology,” and that means, “radically changing society and the role of physicists within it." Few of us have contemplated science as power, but it is, and Prescod-Weinstein vividly reflects on the ways in which “Science has become a practice of control.”
For us in TT, where we speak at a very different level about the shortcomings of our education system, the analysis brings us up short. We realise that the
