The Cosmos Is A Black Aesthetic | Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

In this episode of Curiosity Theory, hosts Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer sit down with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, astrophysicist, cosmologist, writer, and author of Disordered Cosmos and the new The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, for one of the most wide-ranging conversations the pod has had yet.

The discussion moves from how a blog post at Perimeter Institute became the seed of her first book, to what neutrinos actually are, why they are among the strangest particles in the Standard Model, and why they may have played a quiet but essential role in making life on Earth possible. From there they get into Population III stars, how the first heavy elements ever got made, and the surprisingly contested question of what separates a galaxy from a globular cluster.

The conversation also dives into the philosophy of science and Dr. Prescod-Weinstein's concept of white empiricism, the idea that white supremacy and patriarchy shape what counts as legitimate knowledge and who gets treated as a credible scientist. She talks about what her new book offers readers who are skeptical that physics is for them, why the cosmos is a Black aesthetic, how hip hop and Big K.R.I.T. ended up in a physics book, and why access to a dark night sky is a social justice issue, not just an astronomy one.

Chapters

00:00:00 Intro and meeting Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
 00:02:30 How a blog post became Disordered Cosmos
 00:04:50 Blue Sky, Threads, and whiteness in online spaces
 00:09:00 Being one of few Black women at the frontier of physics
 00:11:45 Science communication, community accountability, and the book-before-tenure risk
 00:15:27 What are neutrinos? Three flavors and oscillation explained
 00:25:00 Why neutrinos may be essential to life on Earth
 00:30:00 Population III stars and the origin of every heavy element
 00:35:00 What makes a galaxy? Globular clusters, dark matter, and contested definitions
 00:44:55 Neanderthal DNA and an unexpected dental tangent
 00:49:40 Philosophy of science and the concept of white empiricism
 00:52:00 How white supremacy and patriarchy shape what counts as valid science
 01:02:30 The Edge of Spacetime: what readers can expect
 01:04:48 Poetry, hip hop, and the cosmos as a Black aesthetic
 01:08:40 Objectivity, mythology, and storytelling in science
 01:14:00 Dark sky access as a social justice issue
 01:19:52 Who science is written for and to
 01:23:14 On courage, haters, and Kat Williams
 01:25:18 Where to find Dr. Chanda and her books

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 Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Curiosity Theory. It's your boy and fellow co-host Justin Schaefer, also known as Mr. Fascinate, joined here with a few very special guests, including my co-host, Dr.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Dakota Tyler, astrophysicist and curious, curious guy. So we have a super interesting conversation today. We talked about neutrinos, which we haven't talked before on the pod about. So you can learn a little bit about those little interesting, flavorful particles. And with us, we have Dr. Chonda Prescott Weinstein. She is an astrophysicist, cosmologist, a writer, a very interesting person, a bit of a radical, a trailblazer, basically all of the coolest things that I think a human could be. Thanks for coming on with us.

SPEAKER_04 0:51

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

That being said, let's go ahead and jump in right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

How is it on the east coast?

SPEAKER_04 1:09

You know, we it was like 90 degrees yesterday, and now it's in the 60s.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So we're in that like yeah, fluctuation phase.

SPEAKER_04 1:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

I feel like I've grown to appreciate that more having been in Southern California for so long, where there aren't ri there's kind of seasons, but not really, because I'm from the Midwest, and I like that. I feel like I like that uh the chaos and volatility of it all.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

The seasonality of things, yeah. We're we're both from the Midwest, actually. And and the studio that we shoot out of usually is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So also in the Midwest. So we're kind of right now. I'm in Tulsa, Dakota's in Southern California.

SPEAKER_04 1:48

Yeah, yeah. This is such an interesting framing of things because, like, one of my best friends is from Oklahoma, and he would never say he's Midwestern. He is definitely very strongly a southern man.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

I think Tulsa is definitely the South, but it definitely has like a Midwestern twinge to it. Yeah, I'm from Chicago though.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Okay, okay, yeah. It is interesting though, because Oklahoma didn't exist when the South was first like defined. It wasn't even a thing yet, it was just all the the West, right? Which I guess is why the Midwest is called the Midwest, even though it's really not anywhere near the Midwest.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

Yeah, I don't I I think like Arizona, if we were actually being like specific, like Arizona and Colorado would be like the Midwest, like yeah, like the eastern part of the West, I guess. But I always I like to joke, this really annoys my friend that like Oklahoma is Texas's hat.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Yeah, it is that is kind of how it feels. That is how it feels. Yeah. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

So Chonda, I'm interested in what got you first getting the your own mental ball rolling for writing, for being an author and explaining physics and the social cohesion that exists there to the public.

SPEAKER_04 3:14

I think I feel very lucky that I came of age during a time when physicists and astronomers communicated with each other using blogs. And so everything was like someone writes a blog, like Clifford Johnson had a blog, Sean Carroll had a blog. Sean Carroll was the part of a group blog that I think Clifford was also part of with Julianne Dalcanton and a couple of other people. Um, Sabina Hosenfelder also had like a very popular blog at the time. And then we were all just hanging out in the comments section. And at the time I was studying for my PhD at Perimeter Institute, and I was co-supervised by Lee Smolin, who published a book at the start of my time doing my PhD with him. And so it was just like the culture of we communicate with each other in this format. We're all hanging out in the comments section. And so I started my own blog called The Disordered Cosmos, which then went on to be the title of my first book. But that was kind of like how I got into it was like this was like a natural extension of kind of the exchanges that, like maybe five years ago, people would have about like a new paper on Twitter. We had those exchanges in blog format and in the comments section where people were writing like one or two paragraph long responses. So that was kind of how I got into the mindset of this is just part of the professional, like what you do as a physicist.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, that does make sense. That was so there was the I'm familiar with the Twitter era of oh, a new paper came out and researchers are talking about it on academic Twitter, which I don't know if that's still the case. I'm not actually on X anymore. Um, I don't know if I see it as much on threads. Maybe it's happening on Blue Sky, which I'm it's on Blue Sky.

SPEAKER_04 4:54

There there's like yeah. So Blue Sky scientists, I think, were some of the earliest adopters of Blue Sky, which kind of makes sense given the way that Blue Sky was kind of pitched as a new technological protocol. And um, the starter packs are also a really useful way to find a bunch of scientists and follow them all at once. And so the infrastructure is kind of designed for that. I will say there's a little bit of a bifurcation, like some of the black scientists are not on blue sky and are on threads. And you definitely see that kind of I'm gonna get into trouble for this because people in Blue Sky get really testy when you point out that racial breakdown. Black people on Blue Sky get really testy about that, actually.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

So yes, why do you get really familiar with the culture over there? Um, because I'm not it was too many. I was like, I can't have all of these, so I just chose threads and kind of stuck with that.

SPEAKER_04 5:55

I mean, I think one of the things that happened is one blue sky was invite only, right? And so you create a selection effect of whoever had the early invites, they invite their people, and so you get the network effect. And so I think that there was a lot of whiteness kind of built into it from the start in that way. And then I think the other thing that happened is a lot of black people who are like professional influencers chose threads in some cases for economic reasons, because there were some early like economic incentives to choose threads. And that just kind of engendered a different kind of culture. And now on Blue Sky, there's this very interesting um community in development, Black Sky, which is actually its own separate platform that uses the AT protocol to interface with Blue Sky. And a lot of us like, I'm a monthly donor, I I'm I'm hosted on Black Sky, I'm a monthly donor. So I'm really trying to support this project. And people are um people who are Black Sky users are very protective of Black Sky. So there was like a very prominent Black journalist who writes about race and racism in the United States, made a comment about whiteness on Blue Sky. And she got taken to task. This was like a couple of weeks ago. She got taken to task, not by defensive white people, but by black people who were like, you're disregarding the presence of black people on black sky, which I actually thought how she was spoken to was very unfair. But I've seen a couple of rounds of this. It's like I'm and I think part of it is if you're not on threads, you don't know the vibe on threads. And it's hard to know that threads just has that black Twitter vibe.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yeah, it definitely does.

SPEAKER_04 7:33

And black sky just isn't quite there yet. It's a different vibe.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

What do you feel like is missing from the black sky vibe?

SPEAKER_04 7:42

I think one of the selection effects with Blue Sky is that people who are on Blue Sky, I think, skew towards social justice concerned. And so a lot of the discourse on Blue Sky skews in the direction. Obviously, you can curate for this. And I have a friend who curates very, very intensely. And she doesn't have this experience of seeing a lot of political content and a lot of news stories flying around. But I just think there is a lot less culture talk on blue sky and on threads, you do see the politics talk, but they have intentionally, and they told us this, set up the algorithm so that news doesn't fly around in the same way on threads. And so I'm like author threads is very thriving. We don't really have a thriving author blue sky in that way. Book threads, I mean, book threads and author threads are always like having some kind of drama. So I don't know if it's like necessarily a good thing, but I do think you just get a different feeling because that culture talk has, by intention, had a lot more space created for it on threads.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Interesting. So this that actually leads me to another question. I'm interested in in hearing your take. So you are um, you're an astrophysicist, obviously, you're a cosmologist, and in a field that is majority white male, obviously. It's like, well, maybe it's not obvious, but somewhere around one percent or less of the field is black. Um and so you have this experience of being this being an expert in a field like this and coming up and dealing with uh various challenges, which um would also be be great to hear about. But I'm also but then you're also an author in science communication, which is another heavily, heavily like white male skewed uh um field. Uh and I'm I'm interested in uh what differences or similarities you've encountered in being an expert in this space where you're like one of few people like yourself.

SPEAKER_04 9:55

I mean, I have to say I think it's even worse, right? Because I also work in particle physics and I'm in particular, I work in particle theory and the intersection of like cosmology theory and particle theory, which is like when you talk about issues of homogeneity, it gets much more like as you move more in the theory direction, it gets more homogeneous, right? And um then also particle theory has historically been maybe the most homogenous of all of those areas. And also in some ways, you know, people in particle physics always get kind of or particle theory, people are always kind of surprised when you're like, everybody else thinks that we're the assholes of the field, right? Like I remember particularly when I was a postdoc, I would have people in astronomy be be like, I really wanted to invite you to give a colloquium in my department. But then I just thought, you know, you're a particle theorist, there's no way you'll give a talk that's accessible. And I really had to spend like, I actually give good talks. Like, I am, but the reputation for particle theorists was so bad on this front that I had to make the personal case for myself that actually that ain't mine. Like, I I am not like that. Um, and so I will say part of the challenge is the reputation that we have around, you know, um, like things that have nothing to do with me, but the stereotypes about people like I was gonna say people like me, but they don't have someone like me in mind. They have like some white dude who is like, if you don't understand what's going on, then that's because you're not smart enough or whatever. This is kind of the stereotype. And obviously, being embodied in the way that I am and living I have and coming from the community that I have, I can't afford to have that attitude. And that's also not what I was trained, like my political training. I am not trained for that. I am trained to go out and tell people about what I'm doing and feel like I'm accountable to the community about like the choices that I am making and also wanting to engage the community. So I think, you know, the the interesting tension around writing, and Dakota, I would be interested in hearing your perspective on this because you're from like a generation or two behind me academically, um, is that the attitude was you can't write a book before tenure. Yeah. And this is like such an intense thing that like I had it written into my hire contract. And then when I got my first book deal, I emailed one of the most senior, most powerful faculty members in my department and was like, I got this deal. Like, what do you think about it? And he was like, I think this is fantastic. And that email exchange went in with my tenure dossier, just in case the college committee had questions about how I was spending my time, because they would all get the message that I had been told this is good. The department values this. So I think, like, really the barrier there is like, particularly as a black woman, particularly as like an openly queer person, you already stand out. Do you really want to take the risk of standing out in this other way of having done something that kind of runs against like the norms of the discipline?

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Right. Right. Yeah, it's um it's very interesting that you bring that up. So I also started writing a book in grad school. Um, I'm actually about to submit the my final manuscript by the end of this month, and I had emailed a science uh communicator, author from I think even the generation or two uh beyond you. Um it's a guy, this guy named Jared Diamond, who I think maybe is like problematic in some ways. But I I read some some old books that he that he wrote and I emailed him and he told me that explicitly. He said, if you're gonna write a book, I suggest that you wait until after you get tenured, people are gonna look down on you for it. It's gonna be something and uh I think in my generation, uh, the new version of that is being on social media and making uh like short form videos or um like public-facing communication works that it seems uh to uh a lot of the older academics to be a waste of time. Like, what are you doing? Why is this what you're spending your time doing? Which I think is yeah, it's very indicative of this old guard, gatekeepy and detached from what's going on in society sort of mindset that I don't share. And I also think that it's really important that everybody understands what we know about the universe. And one of the things that you do that I love is you make you make these connections between the way that we understand physics to work at a fundamental level and how that can kind of map on as um uh in in like analogies or parables to the experiences that we have, which I think is powerful because traditionally, I think a lot of that work is just done through um like mythology or you know, old religious text. There's lots of a lot of analogies and and metaphors. And I think that it's really powerful to use the story of science itself. Like, no, this is actually how the universe works. Um, you have a great uh a great metaphor about the queerness of neutrinos. Could you could you could you talk about that and assume that the that whoever's listening actually doesn't even know what a neutrino is?

SPEAKER_04 15:38

Yeah, so let's get started. So neutrinos are fundamental particles, so there's nothing smaller than a neutrino inside of a neutrino. That's the smallest you can break it down to. And neutrinos are um a little bit unusual in our standard model in that they tend to be very fast moving and they interact with almost nothing. Although there is actually some everyday, so bananas emit neutrinos. Totally safe. Like there's, but very occasionally there's a lot of potassium in bananas, which is one of the reasons we're encouraged to eat them. And occasionally one of those um potassium atoms goes through nuclear decay, and as part of that, it emits a neutrino. Again, totally safe. We've been eating bananas like this the whole time. And um, one of the cool things about neutrinos, so there are three different what we call flavors of neutrino. So there's an electron neutrino, a muon neutrino, and a tau neutrino. And you don't need to remember the names, you just need to remember there are three flavors. And a neutrino can, for example, start out as an electron neutrino. So our sun makes a lot of electron neutrinos. That's part of the nuclear process that happens in the sun that makes it bright and shiny. And as a neutrino is flying through space-time, it will just like randomly oscillate into a different type of neutrino. And so the neutrino, an electron neutrino can randomly become a muon neutrino. So I like to tell people that this means neutrinos are non-trinary because they're not stably committed to just one identity. And I think it's a great example of the way in which spending time with physics and knowing about physics kind of blows up people's sensibilities. Like anyone who's trying to tell you it's normal that things are only ever one thing and they never change from one kind to another. That turns out to totally not be true in the most natural environment. And actually, like neutrinos, because they can't be broken down to anything else, it doesn't get much more natural than that, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yeah, yeah, that is really interesting. And the let's see, there's a there is a number of bananas uh in which the radiative decay would be dangerous that you ate, but it's it's like a billion or something, right? So it's like some insane number of bananas.

SPEAKER_04 17:59

You're gonna get so sick from the fiber and the sugar. There are so many other things are gonna go wrong before you're at the point of like uh radiative poisoning.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah, yeah. It's but it's so cool that you point that out. You know, it's yeah, like when we talk about fundamental particles, it what we're talking about is like a particle that you cannot really break down into any more um parts. Like it's that's sort of the base of you know what we understand for building blocks of our universe. And at the base, you see these particles that are flipping between many different things at any given time. And it does wreck this like naturalist ad hoc explanation that I feel like a lot of people are post hoc, I think explanation that a lot of people try to use um when they're trying to say how no, there's only two genders, or you know, people will try to do this evolutionary psychology explanation that things in nature are supposed to be a certain way, like the male and and the female, or like masculine and and feminine. And you know, from a biology perspective, they ignore examples of animals where like the female eats the male or the female is in control of everything. And then if you go in the direction of physics, you're ignoring things that like no, like the stuff that makes everything up itself is not constant, right? Like the the quarks inside of the protons inside of our body also go through this uh flipping, they go through these these changes, and so like nothing is is static. And I really like that as a like kind of like an irrefutable foundational part of physics that we can point to to like dismantle that sort of social, socially constructed idea that we have about um something like gender.

SPEAKER_04 20:00

Yeah, I think you know, the fun thing about it's it's interesting talking about neutrinos because uh speaking of like social and political intersections with like science, I feel the amount I've been talking about neutrinos is a little bit of a controversial thing to do in particle physics right now because the Dune experiment, which is a neutrino experiment that's being run out of Fermi lab, has had so many cost overruns that a lot of people in the particle physics community are feeling very negative about them because that's been used as an excuse for why new particle physics stuff can't be funded. And people are just kind of like, this is like taking up like all of the cash. And um, but I just think that there's such fascinating particles, and there are things about them that we don't understand. Like we we know that they are very low in mass. They're some of the lightest particles out there, but also they do have some kind of mass. And the mechanism that we understand as giving mass to other particles can't give mass to neutrinos, at least not in the way that other particles get mass. And so there's this big open question of like, where do neutrinos get their mass from? And is it related to, so when I say that neutrinos are non-trinary, I'm referring to what in physics is called neutrino oscillations because it oscillates between different flavors. And so there's a big open question there of like, is the mass mechanism somehow related to these oscillations? And I think these questions are just really fun and also a reminder that, you know, we're not made of neutrinos. We're made basically exclusively of electrons and quarks and gluons, if you want to count gluons which hold the quarks together and protons and neutrons. But the existence of neutrinos is cosmologically significant. And in that sense, they're important to our evolution. And the fact that we exist in the way that we do. And so it's also kind of an example of like something that's like almost like we don't need it and extraneous to us, but also somehow is like actually very important to us, even though literally they're like loners and they don't like to interact with other matter really. Like they have no occasion to basically.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yeah. This is this is fascinating. You know, I'm I'm kind of curious about this point that you made earlier. So you talked about fusion, right? Fusion of hydrogen atoms seeming to be a neutrino emitting a quality that the sun has, and that's kind of why it produces its light. Um, and then bananas you know emit neutrinos. It sounds like, but it sounds like you're saying we're not made of them, but are we sources of them? Do we emit them sometimes also? When we eat the bananas, we have potassium inside of us. Does that potassium still emit neutrinos?

SPEAKER_04 22:50

As far as I think, like statistically speaking, it's unlikely that um we are going to emit neutrinos because we simply don't have that amount of potassium in us. I'm sure statistically that occasionally someone does have a potassium atom in them. And I I couldn't do that calculation off the top of my head of like what the um, but like, you know, there's someone out there winning the lottery that occasionally.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

So it's it's it occurs as the result of the decay of a potassium atom. And so you'd have to have a statistically significant number of potassium atoms inside of your body for it to decay and for you to then emit neutrinos. But if there's billions of people on earth all eating bananas, or a lot of us are, I guess at some point somebody hits the lottery, but it's uh it's not like a common occasion. Okay, I got it. Yeah, so what I'm gathering is it's unlikely for humans to be able to emit neutrinos on their own because it specifically depends on those potassium atoms, right?

SPEAKER_04 23:50

Yeah, I think a person does not have enough potassium that this is something that you should. And the other thing is that like even if it happened, even if you're like the lottery winner who like has the one potassium atom where that happens, neutrinos are so hard to catch that like nobody's ever gonna know about it. So, like you could be that person, you're never gonna know. I mean, you could just go around declaring yourself the person who emitted the neutrino because nobody would be the wiser for it.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

I could put that in my bio, neutrino emitter, the one neutrino emitter.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Um, you put you you put this in a really cool way that you know, neutrinos are are these things that are sort of inconsequential to us, but then also weirdly tied to something very important that happens in uh stellar evolution that can even allow life to exist, maybe. And I want to dig into that a little bit more. So we're talking about neutrinos. You know, you said that they don't really interact with uh with things in the way that that we're used to. And one of the sort of fun facts that I'm aware of is that you know, if you if you if you look down at your fingernail right now, there's something like uh a trillion billion neutrinos or a billion trillion neutrinos that are passing through every second, something like that. Some enormous number of neutrinos. So they're like they're literally all over the place. And you know, if you uh aimed a laser that just shot neutrinos at me, it they would just pass through my body, they wouldn't really interact with me.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

And they don't have business with you, they just don't have business with you. That's that's the way I like to think about it.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Yeah, nothing there, but in core collapse supernovas, um, which can be detected by the release of neutrinos before we see with our telescope it explode um because these neutrinos start rushing out, and like you said, they they don't uh they have they have a it's a small, small sliver of business uh in in core collapse uh supernovas where most of them just pass on through. But there is a certain number of neutrinos that do interact with the star as it's as it's collapsing, which um you know helps uh create the supernova, which is very, very important because one of the things that you need future stars and planets to have are these heavier elements that are created in the supernova. So like day to day, yeah, neutrinos don't really matter to us, but in the case of you know, spilling out the contents, the raw ingredients for planets and biological beings, neutrinos actually do play a really important role. And if there were no neutrinos, then like perhaps there would be no us, and you know, we wouldn't be here now, which I think is really interesting.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

Yeah, I mean, I think like a good example. I mean, I don't know if this comes down to like need, but I have gold ear studs in my ear. I'm also like wearing a gold necklace, and the processes where gold is created that happens in um extremely powerful supernovae and kilonobi. There's actually, I guess there's some debate going on in the literature about what exactly the breakdown is of where gold, how frequently gold is made in certain types of stellar deaths. Um, but I think that's an example of the things that we depend on, and some of the higher mass elements in the periodic table of elements actually do come out of supernova processes. And in that scenario, those are things that neutrinos play an important role in the production of that stuff. So it's again, it's one of those things that really taking a cosmic perspective allows you to look at this science that seems like useless. And I put this in air quotes because I think we can have a long conversation about what useful means and should mean socially, politically, culturally. Um, but that's a great example of how it is like out of human biological significance almost that neutrinos are out there doing their thing in stars.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Yeah. Um, so I definitely would agree would back the statement that gold is a need. I usually rock a gold grill, I don't have one on today, but gold to me, it's like gold is that's necessary. Like we need that. We need gold jewelry, you need gold earrings, we need a gold grill. These are these are very important, but also, you know, one of the things that um makes Earth habitable over a long time scale is that we have these active tectonic plates that kind of sit on top of a semi-liquid mantle, and then we have like a liquid, liquid outer core. And the reason that that's really important is because um it kind of helps pull some carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and get it locked away in rocks. Uh, and part of the heating mechanism in the center of the earth comes from this decay of heavy metals. And if we didn't have those heavy metals in the core decaying, keeping things super hot, so we could have this active dynamic surface surface, then you know, it's possible that that would be would make a planet inhospitable, or it's possible that that's one of the mechanisms that we absolutely need for life on Earth. So it's just like another reason that this thing that seemingly is unrelated to us may, you know, be a super important link in the chain to get to long-term stable life on a planet.

SPEAKER_04 29:44

I think that's a great, that's a great example of how having a cosmic perspective allows us to kind of look at the world around us in a very different way. And I say that as like, you know, when you bring up tectonic plates, I'm from Los Angeles. And so, like, I lived through the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Like, I've seen some things. And so, like, for me, that's like a material, like, our house was damaged, um, things were flying off. I've seen, I've seen all of that. And so it's interesting to think about that in connection with all of the pieces that needed to happen, even for Earth to form, right? Like, you can't create Earth with a population three star. Um, like going, or you can't create Earth with that because you need all of these other things to be created inside earlier stars and and so on.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

So you want to give a quick uh like a quick overview of what we mean by population three stars?

SPEAKER_04 30:45

Yeah, so I always found this like kind of weird that actually like you would think that the first stars were population one, but if I that would that would make sense, like first generation, first population. But if I understand it correctly, population three is actually the earliest generation of stars. And in those ones, so you have those are basically like you have hydrogen, you have some primordial helium, you have like negligible primordial lithium. So this is like Big Bang era production, but for the most part, you just have a lot of hydrogen. You have the hydrogen that basically quantum tunnels into fusing. So the hydrogen smacks together in quantum tunnels, and you get fusion going and you get these nuclear explosions. And this is basically you go from a gas to a star, is is kind of the transition that you go through there. And then in the process of this, the helium starts to quantum tunnel and fuse together. And so you get more massive elements. So you get oxygen, you get carbon, you get neon, you get boron, you get all of these other things. And then that's how those atomic elements come to exist in the first place. You get a few other things that are created when those stars, supernova, and then the next generation of stars then has a little bit of metallicity to it. Anything that's like heavier than like helium is a metal, basically, right? To an astronomer. To an astronomer, to an astronomer. And so eventually you get stars like the sun that are forming in gas clouds that have some of these metals that were formed in earlier stars. And you get leftovers, and we're the leftovers, right? Like we're basically solar leftovers that are also powered by solar energy, where the same process is happening again in the sun. And it basically happens in exactly the same way, but you do have some metal in the sun. Again, astronomer definition of metal. So anything that's heavier than helium, which is like almost everything, right? Um, and but you it is the the way that this unfolds is a little bit different for the sun than it would be for a star from a previous generation.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Yeah, yeah. And then so, you know, to to highlight something that you said, the first stars, these pop three stars, couldn't have planets because the stuff that we think of that you need to get started in making a planet that's orbiting in the accretion disk around a star just didn't exist yet. Like there weren't these metals didn't exist. There was no carbon or silicon. Uh, there, you know, there wasn't gold, like none of these things even existed. So that earliest population of stars couldn't even have uh planets.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

So would they be like would they be like gas? So the gas giants wouldn't be possible, would they just be binary or trionary star systems?

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Yeah, I think what you would have is well, there's definitely probably binary star systems or or yeah, multiple um star systems, but a gas giant, even though now a gas like Jupiter is vast majority hydrogen and helium, um, it that's not how it's started. You know, the the process of getting a planet uh forming, you kind of think about starting with little dust grains that kind of you know they stick together and then they collide and they get bigger. And so you do start with a rocky core, but in the example of a gas giant, it starts to get so massive that it actually just starts siphoning a bunch of hydrogen from the disk. So mostly gas, but that's not the way that we we think of them getting started forming. So that that initial mechanism to get the ball rolling doesn't exist if you don't have any of those heavier dust grains or anything. But you know, I think it's easy to to imagine um, you know, that there are binary, trinary, you know, four or five of these early stars in in a system.

SPEAKER_04 34:49

I will say this reminds me of something that I got kind of obsessed with recently because I hadn't really appreciated this. Is there's a huge debate going on about like what the boundary is between a globular cluster, so a star cluster, and a small galaxy. So, what's the difference between a galaxy and a star cluster? And it turns out that this is like not actually a straightforward, like there's one definition, which is something is a galaxy if it has dark matter in it. And so dark matter is this invisible form of matter that we've never interacted with in the lab, but we know from lots of different cosmological and astrophysical observations is out there. And this is actually, I work on dark matter, so this is one of the reasons that this kind of crashed my radar. So one definition is if it has dark matter, it's a galaxy. If it doesn't have dark matter, then it's a star cluster. And we're talking about situations like observed like collections of stars that maybe only have like 60 stars in them. And usually when we talk about a galaxy, we think of like billions of stars, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:53

Wait, there's dark matter, wait, there's galaxies with dark matter that have less than a hundred stars.

SPEAKER_04 36:00

So there is an argument happening in the literature right now about when about a couple of examples. And the reason that this kind of became interesting to me is when I'm always looking for things. I write a monthly column for new scientists, and so I'm always like looking for like what do I, what's something my audience might not have heard about that I want to talk to them about. But in this particular case, this maybe galaxy, maybe star cluster thing is being used in some other research that's trying to make claims about eliminating a particular dark matter model. So we have these models of dark matter of like, we think that it's this particle, and the particle has the following properties. So there's a group that's claim claiming to have eliminated one particular particle from contention by saying that it doesn't match observations of this maybe galaxy thing. But whether, like how seriously we should take these claims depends a little bit on whether the thing is actually a galaxy or not. Because if it's not a galaxy, we're maybe misinterpreting the data. This is actually like it's I think it can be easy to think that all we do is we just point our telescope at a thing, and it's very obvious from the shape of it that's a galaxy. That's just a collection of stars that's inside of a galaxy. And it's actually not that straightforward, especially when you get to very faint stuff that even with our best telescopes, we can't see really clearly. And so I actually went to like one of my best friends, to Sarah Tuttle, who builds telescopes and also does lots of galaxy observations. And I was like, uh, you know, so what do you think of like this boundary? If it's dark matter, then it's a galaxy. And if it doesn't have dark matter, it's not. And she was like, I'm actually not a really big fan of that. And so I was like very surprised. I think I still don't really understand what the boundary would be otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:00

But it turns out this is like an example of something that, like, um it's a big open question that I don't I don't think I have anything to contribute on it for my own research, but like I want to see how it works out.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

That's such an interesting frontier question. I mean, because it almost makes me think about the idea of if there's a I guess a globular cluster of stars that contains dark matter, but then there's a a globular cluster in that cluster that contains dark matter, and there's some kind of space between them. Yeah, they're not like entirely, like maybe gravitationally in some kind of orbit around each other. Like, would they be separate galaxies? Like, where does that line blur? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 38:39

Yeah, I mean, I think the interesting thing about globular clusters also is from, and I don't, again, I don't do research on this, but I do do some amateur astrophotography from my backyard here in New Hampshire.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

We all do too. Yeah, we do too. Yeah, cool.

SPEAKER_04 38:54

Globular clusters, at least the ones that are visible with like kind of consumer equipment, have a very distinct look to them. They tend to be very symmetric. And also, our typical understanding of globular clusters is that they have between thousands and tens of thousands of stars in them. So, again, like having an argument about 60 or anything kind of on that order is like weird from all perspectives because it's almost like not a notable collection, except that all of the observations suggest that this is. So I guess I'm, you know, for people who don't think about these questions as much as we do, um what's what's key here is that these are gravitationally bound. So it seems like they're all gravitationally attracted to each other and separate from other gravitationally bound systems. So they're like their own thing. But the question of like what is bound in with them, right? Which is like, you know, is there dark matter? Is there and what Justin's asking about, like, is there substructure um that we can't see? And this is one of the reasons why people are always asking for bigger telescopes with like um better cameras, right? Um it's not just because like we get uh, you know, uh gas envy or glass envy or whatever. Um sometimes there are things that we simply can't see. Anyway, I just thought that was like such a cool open question that I hadn't really appreciated that people were having this back and forth in the literature about it.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

Yeah, yeah. And for reference, so we live in this enormous spiral galaxy. It's like it's a disk, you know, it has these cool spiral arms, the Milky Way, and there's, you know, what, a hundred, a couple hundred billion stars. Um, and there's this enormous cloud, uh, what we call halo of dark matter that is sort of the spherical thing that encompasses everything and all the normal matter, the baryonic matter is like in the middle in that disk, and it's the stars and the gas and the dust and the planets. But there are these uh there are these little clusters of tens of thousands to you know maybe a hundred thousand stars called globular clusters that actually sit outside of the disk. And they have these super old stars that kind of age the clusters to before we even think that the Milky Way galaxy formed. So there's like these globular clusters that are not necessarily part of our galaxy, but it sounds like there are actually some, which I didn't know this, globular clusters that do have dark matter halos around them, and the cutoff of which ones do and which ones don't isn't clear. And so there that that's interesting that some I didn't even know that, that some globular clusters may be like uh candidates for being galaxies themselves. That's really that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_04 42:03

I think to add a layer to that structure that you were just describing, so we have these globular clusters that are outside of the disk and not necessarily like in this the the bulge area in the in the center. And we also have satellite galaxies. And so to name a couple that people may have heard of the um large Magellanic Cloud and the small Magellanic Cloud, which if you have a friend with a telescope, maybe that's something that they've shown you in the telescope. Um those are examples of galaxies that are the Milky Way is so big and so massive, like it has strong gravitational pull, and it has something like 60 satellites that are somehow bound to it, and a couple that are clearly in orbit. And so the question is like, what's the difference between like some of these clusters and these satellite galaxies, right? And the satellite galaxies we expect will have their own dark matter halo. So that's the bubble. And and the bubble is kind of interesting because like it's easy to think of it as kind of like a circle, like a sphere with um stuff sitting inside of it. And actually the dark matter goes all the way to the interior, but becomes more dominant as you move out to the edges. And so, you know, the next time you look at a picture of a galaxy, you should be thinking that beyond the edge of what we would call the visible matter, there's actually all of this other matter that is still considered kind of part of that same gravitational system. And I will say this is something that I feel a little bit salty about is that I feel like the astronomy community sometimes likes to talk about galaxies as if they exist without dark matter. And you don't get galaxies the way that we have galaxies in our universe, anyway. Without dark matter, Which outnumbers visible matter like five to one.

unknown 44:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:03

So it's like it's like a weird affect of the astronomy community that people will be like, oh yeah, so galaxies, but we just mean like visible matter. And I'm like, that's not a galaxy. At least not in our universe.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yeah. Yeah. That when we say galaxy, we uh typically are referring to um like only 20% of what the galaxy is. Maybe it would be like um the you know, looking at human and calling it a human, but you were only looking at their heart or something like that. And it's like, no, that's actually not most of what a human is, it's mostly a bunch of other stuff, and the heart's important, like a brain and a vat.

SPEAKER_01 44:44

Yeah, like these brains and vats walking around.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Yeah, like a lot more.

SPEAKER_04 44:50

This is like totally outside of my realm of like expertise, but I was actually just having this conversation. I'm I'm pretty close with my dentist slash periodontist, uh, because I was hit by a car when I was 19, and he has been kind of like treating me since I was 20. So it's been like over 20 years now. And I'm like, we have a really good relationship. And so, like, I texted him the other day because there was this story about a Neanderthal that they found like a skull or I guess like some teeth that indicates that the Neanderthals like did some kind of rudimentary, like root canal like drilling into the tooth. And whoever this happened to survived it and like went on to like live for a while. And so I was talking with him about it and I was like, it's so interesting because like, did they have the same? I know a lot about the nervous system in the teeth because of all the experiences that I've had with I my jaw was broken in the accident, and so I've had like all of this work done. And like the nerves in your face are so unusual because it's all one nerve that has lots of different branches, and those branches go into your teeth. And I was like, how did that person do that without painkillers? And my dentist was like, that wasn't a person, it was a Neanderthal. And I was sitting there and I was like, but some of us have Neanderthal DNA. So what is that boundary between like person and Neanderthal?

SPEAKER_00 46:09

I don't know, yeah, and they're still, I mean, they're still humans, right? Homo Neanderthalus or whatever it like they are still humans. That's so interesting that, but it makes sense. Um, because without ever brushing your teeth, I assume that they had rampant uh dental issues. That probably killed them.

SPEAKER_04 46:31

There's inspections. Like, if you don't get a root canal when you need a root canal, it can kill you. Like this actually unfortunately happened with um a Haitian man in the Boston area who was kidnapped by ICE and was in detention and was in need of a root canal and endodontic treatment and didn't get it, ended up with a systemic infection and died in while still detained. And so this is like, you know, on the list of like things that ICE has been doing that are like really fucked up is like people are in real need of like medical care and like just not getting it. And the fact that like dental care in this country isn't taken seriously as like a as a real medical need. But if you get an infection in your tooth and it spreads to your bone, there's so much blood running through that. Like you can get a systemic infection and it can kill you. And so it's like amazing that they kind of like anybody survived, given that they probably didn't brush their teeth, which is also please brush your teeth and floss. People don't appreciate flossing is so key.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

Yeah. And uh, I mean that I mean, that's sort of a a significant commentary on quote progress and where we are in our society that um that's something that is still happening when we have evidence that literal Neanderthals were doing were giving themselves dental dental treatment. And right.

SPEAKER_04 47:57

Can we do better than Neanderthals?

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Right? From as a society, like I almost, you know, I kind of wonder, was this was there like a local Neanderthal uh orthodontist that everybody knew? Like, oh no, your your tooth hurts, you gotta go to whatever his name is or her name that lives in this cave or something, and they're really good at doing that. It's just so lacking that we can figure that out. Yeah, like what is that? What does that look like? Oh, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_04 48:27

I was like very impressed. I mean, I think one of the things that I was wondering about, I'm kind of like an amateur, like I'm very fascinated by plants and herbs that can be used for medicinal purposes. And so I I kind of wonder like, is that a community that at that point understood, like, did they have access to like um like white willow bark, which basically has aspirin properties in it? It has the same chemical that's active in aspirin. Um or like, like, like how did how did they survive that? And also how did they manage? They allowed the infection to come out, but there's always a risk. Like the reason when you get a root canal that you usually take antibiotics afterwards is not is to make sure that any infection that was in there is dead, right? And this person, I'm still going with person. I'm sorry to my dentist. Um, we we just have to disagree about that. They were people, but it is actually it raises like kind of the larger question of the extent to which like categorization in science is about the actual facts versus like what we need to organize those facts in our heads and in our bodies of knowledge, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:45

So so Chand, I was reading about you coining this term white empiricism, right? And uh that's a that's a really interesting term. I'd be curious if you can unpack it.

SPEAKER_04 49:56

Yeah, you know, the it can be hard to talk about this at this point because like what I always want to tell people that me introducing the term white empiricism led to lots of people providing evidence for its existence. It's become this very interesting feedback loop. So I started reading a lot of feminist philosophy of science, and an interesting thing about it is that they would often talk about how the social and the political can shape what we know about things. And even the stories that we tell, I think a very famous example within science, technology, and society circles is, for example, thinking of the sperm as attacking the egg, and how this kind of genders the sperm, engenders the egg and particular narratives about like what a man does and what a woman does. And how if we didn't think in those terms, that we might understand the dynamic between sperm and egg differently. So this is like an example of how like the metaphor, the gendered metaphor that we use kind of shapes our way of thinking about the scientific process and the actual thing that's happening. And in a lot of this writing, people would say, Oh, yes, so physics is an exception to the rule because the laws of physics are universal. And I'm totally the laws of physics are 100% universal. I think gravity is the same for black people as it is for white people. I think it's the same for women and men and non-binary people, like right. Um, but I was, you know, going through my career and noticing I'm a scientist. So I count, I count like the number of women in the room, the number of black people in the room, often being the only one of either in the room. I was very aware of like, you know, being from East LA and that being unusual and being from a working class background is very unusual in physics. And I was noticing these patterns and trying to make sense of them. And I was thinking about all of the black women that I knew who earned PhDs in physics but didn't stay in academia because they had felt pushed out in some way. And something that the general public doesn't always appreciate about that is when you write your PhD on something, it means that you have become the world's expert on that specific problem and solution to the problem. And when you walk away from the field, you take your expertise with you. And so I realized that a gap in kind of this reasoning and feminist philosophy of science was not understanding that people were walking away from the field, taking their perspectives and taking their expertise with them. And that will shape knowledge outcomes, not because like black people have special insight into certain problems, like it's not a race essentialist thing. It is just when you train certain people and then those people don't stay in the field, that knowledge goes with them.

SPEAKER_02 52:49

Right.

SPEAKER_04 52:50

And so I started to think about how like white supremacy and patriarchy shape these outcomes of people being told you'll never make it. Um if you want to succeed in the field, you have to cut off your dreads. I know this is something that people have heard. Um, you know, you your hair has to look professional. You can't seem like you can't rock like your big gold whatever, right? Like if you have a grill, like you should not be rocking a grill like during a talk, those kinds of things. And all of those things are basically practices that make that push people to the margins and encourage them to leave. And sometimes it's much more active, like, I won't write write you a letter of recommendation. Um, I can think of one example where like a white advisor was like, My student thinks she's experiencing racism and I know that she's making it up. And I know that this person came and approached me with this complaint because she thought that I, as a light-skinned person, would be like, Oh yeah, she probably is making it up. When actually I was like, if she's telling you she's experiencing racism, then you should probably listen to her. Right. Um and so I was looking at all of this and I was like, that, for example, that particular example was she was choosing which data she took seriously. Because testimony counts as data. And she was deciding that that data was not meaningful on the basis of the person's identity. So this is like a white supremacist decision. And so I looked at this and I was like, well, how does this shape empiricism? How does this shape like data analysis? And so I started to say that white supremacy is when people practice white supremacy, when they practice patriarchy, they are deranging the empirical process of actually looking at the data for what it is and analyzing it. And so I named this white empiricism and I wrote a paper about it and submitted it to a journal for a paper competition. And um, the paper was a finalist, I didn't win. And when the paper got published, so it came out, I think, in December of was it December of 2019? And it was officially part of the the winter 2020 issue of the of Science Journal, which is a one of the top journals of feminist philosophy and feminist writing in academia. There was a total white supremacist meltdown on Twitter about the paper. Based on the title of the paper, a bunch of people of a certain political persuasion came to the conclusion that I was claiming that black people would discover different science from white people. And this is why I say that it created a bunch of evidence for the existence of white empiricism because they did not actually read the paper or far enough to figure out that the paper was actually kind of claiming the opposite. But they were so certain that based on my identity and the fact that I mentioned black women in the title, that they knew what I was saying. Um I'm actually revising that chapter right now, or that paper right now for my third book, The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic. And it was a little bit of fun adding in the section. That's a great name.

SPEAKER_00 56:15

That's a great name for a book. I'm jealous. Ah, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_04 56:19

I feel pretty proud of that. That like might be the height of me and Bars. Like I probably won't have that, but I'm I'm putting a version of that paper into the book, and I had to add a section where I was like, this is how the paper was received, that people were so biased against feminist philosophy, against black studies, and against black feminist thought that they couldn't even process the claim that the paper was making, which is that we have to be more careful with data, not less careful with it, and that we can't be essentialist with it. So, anyway, that's like white empiricism.

SPEAKER_00 56:53

Yeah, there's, you know, there is this belief that I think what all Western science started to have um on its inception, right? Like however many hundred years ago it was. And you know, one of the first, in my opinion, one of the first main major goals of one of the first major collective goals of Western science was to prove the inferiority scientifically of black people and I guess all colored people. And so you see the field of phrenology, which now we know is uh uh you know just a racist uh pseudoscience. But that was one of the first main goals. And two, with Western science, you see this uh um apparent mindset where uh they think that they're all objective, right? And so, like the people, the these examples that you gave, uh these various scientists, these various academics in the field, they think that they're being objective when they arrive at a conclusion, whether it's talking to you, whether it's hearing the claim of somebody, whether it's reading the headline of an article, and they they think that they they genuinely think that they're being objective and that they are, you know, uh approaching these issues with uh uh like a clean scientific slate. This is like what they believe, it's what they think, and it's not true, and it's not true for any human that you can approach anything objectively. That is not how humans work. You know, we evolved as uh as apes on this planet. No, we we we aren't machines that are just like logically thinking, even if we you know aspire to to train ourselves to be objective, it's like it's not that's not what a person is. And it's a failure, in my opinion, to even understand scientifically what life is. Uh if that is how you think about yourself, that you are this objective, like logical being that has ascended the you know, the emotional afflictions that that other humans have. Yeah. It's that's really important.

SPEAKER_04 58:57

I think you know, one of the things that I wrote about in the paper was a statement that had been made by um a fellow Black physicist whose name is escaping me right now, of course. It's cited in the paper, where he points out that like one of the things that Einstein's general relativity can contributed to physics was the idea that all observers are equal. And if we take this to its logical conclusion, every observer, given the same information and same piece of pieces of equipment, so the same resources, all resources being equal, will come to the same conclusions about the nature of the universe. This is actually like one of the most powerful statements of like how universality works in physics. And so he was part of what he was arguing was that then we have to take this to its logical conclusion that this also means that black people are equal observers to white people, black physicists are equal observers to white physicists. And I put this into the paper with a citation. So I'm not even taking credit for being the first person to kind of like make this connection, and said that this suggests that um if we're coming to the conclusion that all observers are not created equal, that this has something to do with the social structures that are shaping people's pathways into the field and resource access. And this was later used in a couple of places, including in the conservative press, to claim that I did not believe that general relativity was correct. Which was like, I was literally arguing in the paper that because general relativity is correct, this is one of the metaphorical lessons that we can take away from it. Um, and then they took it a step further and said, because I don't believe that general relativity is correct, that I should not be allowed to serve in the national service positions that I had. And this was like the irony of the entire thing. Obviously, like it sucks a little bit to have stuff like that happen. And I've had a lot of like um polemics and the press try and assign viewpoints or statements to me that they can't actually verify, but also their audience doesn't care if it's verified or not, right? Um, but it was also for me as an academic working on this problem, like super interesting to have people continuously lean into all I can do is make things up about her, and all I can do is make things up about the statement because you are literally just proving my point that you refuse to reckon with real facts and real data. And also, like my entire body of scientific research is premised on the idea that general relativity is at least approximately correct. I mean, I wrote my dissertation about quantum gravity, so but even actually like I worked in loop quantum gravity, which is the approach to quantum gravity that starts from the assumption that relativity is correct and quantum field theory has to conform to it as opposed to the other way. Um, but it is so interesting. Like, that's not something when I wrote the paper, I didn't predict that. I will, I can't even take credit for saying I'm gonna write this paper about white empiricism that's gonna just continuously produce evidence for itself by virtue of existing.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

Um so you I wanna I wanna be sure that we get to this. Um, you have a book that we, you know, we've sort of referenced it several times that just came out. Um you have well, actually, what do you, you know, we have a really curious audience that is, you know, typically into science, but may not be scientists themselves. Um in your words, uh what do you think uh they could they could get from from this book?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:56

Yeah, so the edge of space-time. So it's called The Edge of Space-Time Particles Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. And so it's definitely for any fellow Langston Hughes fans out there, you'll probably recognize the dream boogie uh as a line that comes from the opening of his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred. It is a book that is for people who are skeptical that physics is relevant to their lives, and it is also a book for people who already think physics is relevant to their lives. And it makes a series of claims that if you want to understand black history, you got to start with cosmic history, that cosmic history is very firmly black history. This is like a very important statement to me. It also makes the claim that part of what physics offers every person is insight into abstraction as an experience and as a part of our universe and as part of our world. And a playground that allows you to practice engaging with abstraction without big political consequences, but at the same time, that prepares your brain for the kinds of abstraction that you need to grapple with when politicians are talking to you and using weird metaphors and references, that this is where you can train your mind to be ready for that tough problem solving that we have to do as political actors. Um, but it's also fun because you've got non-trinary neutrinos, which are also non-binary particles, and you have an expanding universe, and you have photons, which are like light is a wave, but also it's photons, and that's fucking weird. And there's something deeply poetic about it. And so there's also a lot of poetry. Um, and I will say, like for me, like spiritually, the heart for me of the poetry was using Big Crit's lyrics in the book, um, and talking about how Big Crit actually is like a I I need to have a conversation with him at some point because I'm just like, you're a big fucking science nerd. I don't know if you know this about yourself, uh-huh, but he's like working on the series of songs that are all titled like variations of my sub. And actually, when I wrote the book, there were only six of them, but number seven came out in December. And each one of them in some way grapples with science and scientific questions. And so, like in the book, I talk about my sub part three, where he's basically talking about a dude who's trying to wire up his car with two 15s, like so 215-inch subwoofers, and he fucks up the wiring and fries it. And I was like, this is an electrical engineering story. Like, so like I talk about that. And he basically is making the case, and that song is on the album Catalactica, where he's basically saying, if you want to think about the origins of Southern hip hop, um, you need to think about the Big Bang. And you need to understand the 808 and the foundational machine of hip-hop as a as its own kind of big bang. And that's like a beautiful metaphor. It's a great example of how the cosmos is a black aesthetic. And it's a great example of how knowing something about cosmology and knowing something about physics can actually become part of your art and part of how you make sense of your world. And I will just say my subpart four is called Subinstein. And it's basically a Frankenstein subwoofer story, which, like, who knew you could even do that? But that's also it's like science fiction meets subwoofers, which is like his whole um, so I will just say, like, I love that. That's my favorite, that was my favorite part to write. And I'm continuing the writing about that in my third book, The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic. So you should also think of The Edge of Space Time as like um a prep book that for the Cosmos as a Black Aesthetic. That book will stand on its own, but they're kind of a pair.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Gotcha. No, that's that's so fascinating. I actually did know that Big Crit was was uh a pretty huge nerd. He's he's really big into sci-fi, and I know in Outcast, a lot of times I feel like they typecasted Andre 3000 as like the really out there one, and Big Crit was kind of more the traditional hard rapper, but he's definitely got this other side to him that I think goes underappreciated. It was a big boy. Oh yeah, wait, oh yeah, that's wait. I'm I'm confusing big boy and big crit. But I do know big crit is the one that also has the song uh time sheen, right? Time machine. In my time sheen, yeah, I ride clean. That's that's big crit.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:40

I don't do I think we're all like, we need to check that.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:46

Yes, it is big crit. Time machine is big crit. So he does have other like sci-fi songs. Sometimes they, yeah, sometimes they kind of sound similar to me, big boy and big crit.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:55

I don't know, man. You're gonna get Mississippi on your ass about that. You're right. Time machine, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:59

I'm not cosigning that.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:01

This is big crit, but yeah, uh yo, Atlanta and Mississippi are both gonna be coming for Tulsa.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:11

Like, hey, hey, no, I I love this, you know. The the the going back to one of the first questions that I asked, like what kind of inspired you to write about your knowledge, your expertise in this way, linking it to our experiences as humans. And it's not something that I think is encouraged a lot in science. You know, it's like it seems to me that a lot of times, you know, in the in the air of um or in the vein of this objectivity, we're like not supposed to talk about these spiritual things or things that are you know linked to our feelings. And it's it's like almost deeply in inhuman. Um and I think that uh the you know, what's moving for people, uh just all for all of us, is still is the story and using science and fundamental physics as a uh narrative where we can draw these lessons from, you know, in the way that that our ancestors did in in mythology and storytelling. And I think that it's powerful to be able to link those stories to this factual world that is observable, right? That that doesn't um it doesn't require you to believe in in magic, right? It it only requires you to believe in these physics that we uh have have kind of you know proven. I don't know if I like that word, but observed.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:38

I think that's yeah, I mean, I think you can draw a straight line, a very complicated one, but a straight line from those early moments when um the primordial plasma starts to cool down and the first hydrogen atoms form, and so light can fly freely through the universe for the first time. You can draw a line between that moment and star formation and planetary formation, and eventually crit sitting somewhere and coming up with the lines for his songs and selecting beats and and and all of the things that he does, including like, I'm sitting here, I'm just gonna grab it because it's sitting on my desk. Like, this is the art for the album, Catalactica, right? There's this whole cosmic aesthetic on it. That's not just like, oh, he wanted to invoke the cosmos as part of his story, which he does, but also this whole thing exists because those processes happened in the very early universe. And I think having that cosmic perspective can help us. Um there's a line in the introduction of the book that the universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism. And like when you think about like the problems that we have right now, they are big for us and they are serious. And also, you know, the fact that on one tiny little planet, on like a fairly average star in one galaxy, has one species that came up with this economic system, doesn't suggest that this is like a norm in the universe and how the universe has to be, right? And so I think that cosmic perspective also allows us to kind of just think differently about what we should expect from the universe that we are a part of. We are not outside of it. So, what expectations should we have of the world around us, but of the universe around us? And I just think that there's something really beautiful about that, and I think also we need that motivation right now because times are really tough.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:48

Yeah, uh, totally, totally agree with that. Um, yeah, you know, we we're like injected into this socioeconomic system that has kind of been forming for however many years. And it's if you're not if you're not like reflective and uh intentional about the things that you value and you care about, then you just kind of like absorb these values that the system at large has, which is what like make money, become powerful, become, you know, become high status, whatever, whatever that means. And one of the one of the to draw on you know these lessons from the universe, it's it's like, you know, we know for a fact that we live in this universe that's at least uh 13.8, you know, billion years old. It's at least 90 billion light years across or something like that. There's trillions of galaxies, uh and your your like purpose and mission in life is to uh like maximize the GDP. It's like make your pockets as big as possible. It can't be right. It's it's the least it's the least creative sort of uh application of yourself, in my opinion, when you have that cosmic perspective, which I think is like very helpful because for some people it can be existential, where it's like, oh my god, I I don't matter. Um, but I think for me it's very freeing, and it's like, wait a second, no, this I have this limited time, I have all this information, I can actually make my time here be about whatever I want it to be. I can I can like alter my attitude and the way that I interact with these systems and you know what my norms and values are. I just think it's so powerful, yeah. That that cosmic perspective.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:37

I mean, I think I'm just gonna assume everybody has has seen sinners and hasn't made major life errors and not seeing sinners. But I I think about that scene where Delta Slim is talking about what the blues means to people, um, right before the piercing of the spiritual veil. And in that scene, he's just talking about how this was something that colonizers and enslavers couldn't take from black people. And in that place, black people were free. And I think that that should also be how we configure our relationship to the cosmic and to the night sky, which is like that is something that we should try and hold on to. And at the same time, be very conscious of like, you know, when we talk about the impact that mass incarceration has on people and on communities, one of the things that happens when people are incarcerated is that they don't get access to the night sky. And our species, for generations and generations until very, very recently, everybody has grown up under a dark night sky and has had regular access to a dark night sky. And so the question we need to be asking ourselves is what are we doing to our folks spiritually when we don't give them that place of meditation and that place of connection, particularly if you take the reformist narrative of someone's going to prison to fix themselves. But if you cut them off from all of the things or many of the things that help them be human and feel human, then how are they supposed to do that work? And I don't even particularly believe that story, but even if I took that story seriously, then cutting them off from the night sky isn't doing that work because you're not allowing people to have that relationship. And so I think I think about that scene, and then actually I will just say that in relation, there's like one thing that sinners got wrong, which is like in the piercing of the spiritual veil, they have that moment where it pans out big and you see the night sky, and there are not enough stars in the sky, it is not dark enough in 1932, Mississippi, the sky would have looked darker and not light polluted. So I will just say Ryan Kugler, next time talk to you, an astronomer. That was like the one thing you messed up.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:58

Yeah, yeah. It's a that's such a great point. And to, you know, even beyond the night access to the night sky, in the case of prison, for example, which yeah, is allegedly for rehabilitation, though I also think that I would disagree with that. Um just what humans are naturally supposed to be around, other people, um, like so not even just the night part, but like sunlight. Uh instead of in a like a little cubicle with just fluorescent lights 24-7, um, they're they've almost been put in one of the least human, least natural environments that you could imagine constructing for somebody. And when somebody gets in trouble and or you know, for whatever reason they end up in isolation, that is again, it's like the most inhuman environment to be in where you're not even interacting with other people. It's it's insane to think that that would ever uh produce uh like a reformed person in any sense of the word.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:07

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, in relation to that, not just people who are incarcerated, but also there are a lot of people who don't have access, regular access to Dark Night Sky. And, you know, growing up in Los Angeles, I grew up right next to the 10 freeway and it was smoggy 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles. Um I I didn't really know that you could see the Milky Way with the naked eye until I was well into my teens. And um, you know, that is a resource access question. People getting access and the opportunity to spend that time. And, you know, that's a that's about the failure of mass transit, that we don't have a robust train system that gets people to dark night skies, that actually a lot of places where redlining happened are specifically designed to make it hard for people from inner city communities to get out into more suburban, less urban environments that have darker night skies. When you really think about that as kind of an organizing idea, if everyone in society should have access to a dark night sky, it raises a lot of questions for us about how we have structured things and what access means. Because if, for example, you are a child who is hungry, even if you get to that physical space, if you're hungry, you're not focused because you're hungry, right? There are just so many things that when we start to think about like that very basic thing of giving people that one opportunity, it invites us to make so much social change and to reconfigure our understanding of how we organize ourselves politically and socially and economically. And so the edge of space-time that was a thought that I started working with and talking about in my first book, In The Disordered Cosmos, a journey into dark matter, space-time, and dreams deferred. And the edge of space-time is me really saying, like, let's like open up this universe and see, like, when you have a moment to spend a few hundred pages with these ideas. What is the way that that changes how the universe looks to you to like know something? And I'm thinking about, like, for example, Tracy Thomas, who's the host of the Stacks podcast, a big books podcast. And she's like very self-confessed, like, I don't understand science, I don't know science, science doesn't know me. And she was telling me yesterday that she's still thinking about the quantum cat. And she was asking me, as a fellow Black Jew, she was like, you know, um, can we use that quantum cat for this particular type of metaphor? And I was like, look at that. It's been weeks since you read the book, and you are still thinking about this one idea. And that's like the thing that I want the book to do to people is like, not that you'll memorize or take a test at the end, but that you'll have this thing that stays with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:03

Yeah, yeah. This like idea that you can ponder on and just like try to absorb. I like, yeah, I really like that. I like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:11

And I think that's something, you know, when I write, I write for East LA and I write for um the parts of Brooklyn that my family uh was in and that I spent a lot of time in growing up. And I think that we deserve to have science books written to us, and we deserve to have things written to us that speak to our spirit. And I don't mean that in like the supernatural way, but in the like, how are you on the inside kind of way? We deserve to have those things without them being tied to, and here's how you make a book, without having to to justify it, but just say, I'm curious. We deserve to be curious, and we deserve to have that space opened up for us. And so um it's fun for me to like use Missy Elliott to write about symmetry and big crit to write about the origin and evolution of space-time. And I hope like more people will think of their versions of that and and do their version of that. I don't want mine to be like the only, I want it to be part of a leaderful, as I've seen Kies A. Lehman say, um, situation. So I'm looking forward to your book, Dakota.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:28

Yeah, yeah. Um, I hope to do a version exactly of what you say, where it's, you know, it's there, there's for whatever reason, there's always, you know, there's this one way that science communication is typically done. And it's the same way that a lot of the science communicators do it and have always done it. And there's like no no reason that you can't branch off and do it in a way that's more meaningful. And I mean, a piece of it is exactly what you were saying before that you develop this expertise. Uh, and if people leave the field, that expertise is gone, that perspective is gone, that way of communicating ideas is gone, and it's just lost. And it makes, you know, for something, for example, for what you do, it makes you a trailblazer. But many people should be doing this as well. I 100% agree with it. And it doesn't need to be the um like a one-off, right? I I think it should be come common, um, which is one of the yeah, which is one of the reasons that I admire your work and the way that you the way that you talk about these things and the courage, which I think it takes like it takes courage to to be able to create this thing in that way. And I really like it. I I admire it. So yeah, I hope everybody listening grabs the edge of space-time and then also this the disordered cosmos and looking forward to your future book as well. Uh, remind me of the title again. What was it?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:58

The cosmos is a black aesthetic.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:00

Oh, that's so good.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:02

I know. I really feel like, and you know, maybe I can just say one thing about like the the courage. I mean, sometimes we're just doing things because it's like you do what you got to do to survive, right? As as Pac said. But also, um, you know, the one thing about having haters chasing you around is that it can be kind of freeing because at some point you're like, someone's just gonna be mad. Like, someone's just gonna be mad about it. And so you start thinking about like, okay, well, what can I do for the people who aren't like that? What can I do for the people who are gonna witness it for what it is, as opposed to the people who are gonna like have uh, you know, a deranged empiricism moment with it. And so I do think that there is an element that the people who come after me don't appreciate that they create a kind of freedom in that way because like I can just no longer concern myself with that, and that encourages me to push into and be in stronger relation with the the people who get it and the people who want to be spoken to. Um, which I don't know. I I just like always think about like Kat Williams, who's like, if you don't have enough haters by the end of the summer, that's your goal, right? And I think that that's part of it, right? And he's like, if you don't have anyone to hate on, then hate on me because you know my luxury my hair is luxurious. I I love cat cat has many complications, but I appreciate that. And I think, like, you know, when we talk about what courage is, I actually think that on a level that that's what it is, is like just realizing like how you orient yourself to the world, and like you should orient yourself away from the haters and find the freedom that comes with that decision.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:57

Absolutely, it's powerful. Yeah, all right. Well, Chana, I think that is a very powerful note to end on. You left us with something to think about. We super appreciate you joining us. Uh, and for the folks that are still tuned in with us, China, can you can you tell them about where they can find you and maybe a little bit more information about the book as well?

SPEAKER_04 1:25:18

Yeah, so you can find the edge of space time in any bookstore. It's now available in Europe, in the UK, as well as um in North America. So anywhere you buy your books, please support your local indie bookstore. There are almost always signed copies of the Edge of Space Time at my local independent bookstore, Water Street Books, in Exeter, New Hampshire. And they ship all over the United States for free. So if you want a signed copy, you can you can get a signed copy from them. And the Disorder Cosmos, also available everywhere globally. And you can find me on Instagram and threads at chonda.pressguide.weinstein, and you can also find me on blue sky at chonda.blacksky.social. And um, you can also, if you're someone who looks at websites, chonda.science.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:11

Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you all so much for tuning in to another episode of Curiosity Theory. And as we always say, stay curious, even when you're on the edge of space-time. Peace.