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(inspirational music) (inspirational music) - [Narrator 1] And now, the "Cascade PBS Ideas Festival," featuring journalists and newsmakers from around the country in conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for "Radiolab," from WNYC, with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, moderated by Molly Webster.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our members.

We'd also like to thank our premiere event sponsors, Amazon and HX Expeditions, our founding sponsor, the Kerry & Linda Killinger Foundation, our session sponsor, Alaska Airlines, and our host venue, The Picklr.

(audience clapping) - Welcome to the "Cascade PBS Ideas Festival."

I'm Molly Webster, a reporter and host at Radiolab.

And tonight I am in conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

She's a particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire.

Hi Chandra.

- Hi Molly.

- Hi.

Yes.

(audience clapping) Okay, so one of the reasons we're here is Chandra wrote this amazing new book.

I'm gonna read the whole title, "The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie."

That's a lyric, right?

This is, the title is from- - Cosmic Dream Boogie Inspired is inspired by the opening section of Langston Hughes's "Montage of a Dream Deferred Dream Boogie."

So it comes from a couple of lines in the poem.

- What you will find when you read this book, which everyone should do, is that Chandra's brain works like this all the time, in that it takes anything from Langston Hughes to "Sesame Street" and applies it to like deep space time and particle physics.

And it is amazing feat and it makes the book a good read.

And so what I wanna do here tonight is talk about the book, but also the only person who could have written this book in the way that it was written is Chandra sitting next to me.

And so the way I wanna start is just getting a sense of like, could you, there are so many ways to identify you and that you identify yourself as you move through the world, like queerness, Blackness, Jew, LA, you know?

- East LA.

- [Molly] East LA.

- East LA (laughs).

- Can you just share with us like sort of the family culture in which you grew up in?

- So I grew up in a political organizing family.

I am, I guess like a third or fourth generation activist organizer, political thinker.

Until I was 10, I thought being Jewish meant you were a union organizer.

- [Molly] I love this.

- And I learned that lesson at Passover.

Like, it just seemed to completely fit in for me.

And in a sense, I'm kind of the odd one out in that I chose science as my professional path.

On the other hand, my dad studied maths and philosophy in university, so it's not entirely outside of the family tradition, except, you know, he immediately went off and became a union organizer union president.

So very different direction.

- He's like, "I know how I can squeeze this in."

That's funny.

Both my parents were professors and I, until I was like in high school, thought no one worked in the summer.

And then I was so sad when I found out, I was like, wait, what do you mean?

- If we ask them whether they worked in the summer, would they agree with this?

- Yeah.

Well my mom was raising four girls, she was working, and my dad would do teach summer school.

And I just remembered that being as like an exception.

Like, oh, he went and did summer school, but it turns out right, that's what most people do.

And then you have, one of the strains that like runs the book is you have these figures in your life that really shaped you in a way that propels you to this moment now.

And one of them is your grandfather.

So maybe you could tell us, in my mind, I connect your grandfather to introducing you to your first computer, which feels like it's setting you off on a path of like science knowledge.

- Yeah.

My dad's biological father who my dad didn't actually grow up with for most of his childhood, just for family reasons, that's the way that it worked out, was a huge feature of my early years.

And he was a machine worker.

He hadn't graduated from high school.

In Brooklyn, my understanding is that his younger sister showed promise as an opera singer.

So he dropped out of school to go to work and pay for her singing lessons, which worked out.

She went on to become an opera singer, but it also meant he spent the rest of his life and the shop.

And so he was a machine worker, he was a woodworker by hobby.

So he built things that ended up in my bedroom as a kid.

And when computers started to come onto the scene and consumer computers came onto the scene, he became very convinced that computers were the future.

And so he had an Apple 2E, he also had an Atari computer, which I often tell people about this.

And they're like, you mean the video game system?

I'm like, no.

Atari made computers.

- A lot of, "Hmms," I got a lot of, "Hmm."

- Okay, we're with the right age group here.

And so I had access to those things even though I grew up in a working class union family.

So we weren't like rolling in it.

But I think my environment was very rich intellectually because my family was very intellectually engaged.

- How young were you when you got a computer?

- I think the earliest photograph I have of me with my grandpa Norman and a computer, I'm probably like two in that photo.

- I love that.

And then, on the other side of things, there's like this, there's these stories of him just taking you to baseball games and telling you you could be a ball player one day.

- I actually very distinctly remembered the moment.

So my grandfather, I'm a third generation Dodger fan, so shout out to all the Dodgers.

Yes, thank you.

And he grew up watching them in Brooklyn and then in Los Angeles.

And so we would watch a lot of Dodger games on television, and I very distinctly remember noticing that the only women who were on the field were as ball girls, what are called, so they go out and they get the ball from the field when there's a stray or a foul or something like that.

And I picked up on this pattern early and I very distinctly remember, I must've been about four turning to him and saying, "Can I play baseball?"

I already like, and our household being at baseball player was like hero stuff.

And so that was really the first job I wanted to have.

But I was already thinking like, am I allowed to have that job?

And without missing a beat, he said, "By the time you're old enough to play, you will be allowed to play."

And for me, I think it was a really important moment because that was the first time someone said to me, just because you don't see someone who looks like you doing the thing doesn't mean you cant do the thing.

And it kind of, I mean, it, it does actually matter that we still haven't seen a woman in major league baseball.

I do think that picture is coming and she's coming soon, say, and I'm very excited about the launch of the league, the Women's League this summer.

That's been very exciting.

But I think that the message was for me, and he understood that this wasn't really a conversation about baseball, it was a conversation about what I was allowed to be in the world, and that he needed to be very clear with me that if I saw a thing that I wanted to do, I had to hear you're allowed to do that thing.

And I think that that's gone on to be a very important, I think that's one of my abiding stories of like, what am I allowed to do?

Well, anything I decide that I wanna do.

- That's like, what an amazing gift.

- To get that.

We would all benefit from hearing someone say something like that to us.

- Yeah.

- And it feels like you got that from a number of people in your family, like in a way, you talk a lot about being raised by a community that was looking out for you in different ways.

- Yeah, I mean, I will say it was like, you know, being a physicist or an aspiring physicist in a political organizing family can actually be a little bit complicated.

- I love it.

I love it.

It's for everyone else, it's like, that person wants to be a painter and you're like, I wanna be a physicist.

And everyone's like, "No."

(laughs) - I mean, kind of.

I mean, I think that there was real anxiety, particularly for some of the older folks in my family that for them, physicist is defined by the Manhattan project, and by nuclear weapons.

And so I think that there was a lot of anxiety that me training as a physicist would mean.

So getting socialized into an environment where we don't ask the hard ethical question of just because we can, does that mean we should?

- Right.

- And so there was some resistance from some quarters of the family as to like, whether this is like a path that I should be encouraged to pursue or whether I should be actively discouraged.

So it was, it was not, it was not necessarily straightforward.

At the same time from all of these people, I'm getting the message that it's important to fight for my rights.

And when you grow up in a family where speaking out is the norm and making your case is the norm, I think it could sometimes be challenging for them that like, I learned from the best and sometimes turn those tools around on them.

- I love that.

I always said that to my parents.

I'm like, you taught me to be this way.

Like, I mean.

- You know, when my mom and I talk sometimes I'm just like, "Mom, where did I get that from?"

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm sure they love us.

- She wasn't one of the people who was, she was actually very supportive.

So just to be clear.

Yeah.

- When did, when do you think you started to become an aspiring physicist?

- Oh, I definitely like the moment.

I remember, again, the moment where this happened.

So I knew I really liked doing math.

And one of my teachers at school, I had had a fifth grade science elective with Frank Wilson.

And he, I guess told my mom, she really likes this physical science stuff.

You need to like encourage her, engage her, get her out into it more.

And so my mom was looking at the newspaper and saw that there was a showing of a documentary called "A Brief History of Time" by Errol Morris.

It was a documentary about Stephen Hawking, and it was only showing at one theater in Los Angeles.

So as you heard earlier, I grew up in East LA, I'm very proud to be from East LA, and it was showing on the West Side.

So this was like a very big expedition of like, we have to go, it's gas money.

We could only afford to go to matinees.

I don't think my mom and I ever went to a movie that wasn't a matinee growing up.

'cause the money just wasn't there.

And so she is on a Saturday morning, we're going to see this documentary and I'm like, what do you mean we're going to see a documentary during "X-Men?"

- I was thinking cartoon Saturday morning.

- I'm just like, "X-Men," we watch "X-Men" on Saturday.

So I'm like complaining the whole car ride.

And again, we're going from East LA to West LA so it's a bit of a ride.

And we get to the theater, I'm complaining documentaries are for adults, why are you making me do this?

And then halfway through Stephen Hawkings talking about how we use math to describe the universe and that it's his job to use math to solve problems that Einstein hadn't solved.

And I was like, wait, this is a job.

They pay you to do math all day.

It turns out that's not actually the job, but I, there's a lot of bureaucracy.

We can get into that later.

- That'll be the after party.

- The after party is university bureaucracy.

But halfway through I was just, I was sold.

That was what I wanted to do.

Math describes the universe, and then I came out of the theater begging my mom.

I was like, I have to have a copy of the book.

Buy me the book, buy me the book.

My mom's like, "I don't know, I don't know.

It might discourage you, you're a little bit young," but she must have told her older brother for whom the book is in part dedicated to my grandpa Norman and my uncle Peter, because my uncle bought it for me for my 11th birthday.

- Oh my God.

So sweet.

- But that was like the very clear cut.

And then a few months after that I found Steven Hawking's email address and emailed him and said, how do you become a theoretical physicist.

- At 11?

- At 11.

And this is like not long after the worldwide web first became publicly available.

This was like 1993, 1994.

- Wow.

Well, did Steven write you back?

- One of his graduate students wrote back.

Which like in hindsight as a professor, your graduate students are supposed to be calculating, not responding to fan mail.

Wanna put that out there for any faculty who are listening.

- Well, I would, now I would disagree, because it birthed more physicists into the world.

- That's true.

So the graduate student explained to me, you have to go to college, you have to go to a top college, get a PhD, and then you become a fellow, and then you become a professor.

And so immediately I started researching, okay, which colleges have good financial aid?

And so by the time I was 12, I had worked out I'm going to Harvard or Caltech because those schools can pay.

- Wow.

- And I knew I would need a full ride.

- Yeah.

But I wanna ask a question about like the love of math.

Like what is that like?

Does it?

- But why?

But why?

- Like almost more, almost more like what does it feel like to like, to be like, math.

Math is great?

I wanna say I do like math.

I do like math, but I'm hearing like I'm- - Hearing that you're a hater.

- I'm hearing No, I was like, I love math.

I was like good at math, like, just a sec.

But no, but I- - Bold for someone who works at Radiolab.

- But I don't know that I like loved it.

Like I think like my ego thought it was fun that I like could do calculus or complicated problems.

And when I was in biology, like doing statistics was so important to lab work and stuff, and I'm really glad I learned that stuff.

But I don't know that in my bones I'm like math.

So like what does it feel like when math is in your bones?

- You know, I think for me it started with, I just really like the pattern.

- [Molly] Okay.

- And I mean, I will say, I should say that I first learned my times tables because I have this thing, I don't like it when people know things that I don't.

And in my first grade class there was a 5-year-old named Anna, I still remember this very clearly.

And she knew something called timestables and I did not, and I was like outraged by this and went home and demanded that my father teach me whatever this times tables thing was.

- You like today at school I heard about something called the times table.

- I just like, and it wasn't even that like I don't have a problem with other people doing as well as I am, but I don't wanna be behind.

I think that that was really, and so I just wanted to know, and I just loved the pattern.

I loved the consistency and the sequence of the times tables.

For me it was like a very satisfying, I mean, in the social studies of science work that I do, we talk about the affective experience of doing science, that there is an emotional feeling that that goes with it.

And I think that was like my first taste of there is this emotional like, ah, moment of like when the thing sits and it makes sense and everything seems like it's in its right place.

And so I really enjoyed that.

And then my grandmother, my mother's mother, my grandma Elsa taught me long division.

And so there was, then there was this other layer, and again, I had this feeling of like, oh, there's the system with these rules and you can use these rules to find out so many different pieces of information.

You can divide any two numbers and get an answer and you just have to follow.

So I liked the algorithmic element of it.

- What is it like, calming, meditative?

Like does your brain go, is it like, makes me think about like rock climbers who say like, the world falls away and you're just like really focused?

I wonder.

Yeah.

We think of science as so intellectual.

I do think it's like an important point to underline of that there's, there's a physicality to it almost.

- Yeah.

I mean, I think in hindsight we can look back.

I was obsessed with The Count and his bats on Sesame Sesame Street.

- Well that's a PBS shout.

- Yes.

- Thank you, PBS!

- I am such a child of "Sesame Street."

Absolutely.

Oscar the Grouch and The Count were like my buds.

And so the Count and the bats actually appear on the Edge of Space-Time just because I wanted to talk about The Count and it was like a really great opportunity to use an example that I thought would be legible.

But I really liked counting the bats with the count.

I enjoyed doing that.

And so I do think that there is, this kind of numbers have this kind of magic to them, at least for some of us.

I understand that not everyone has that experience with them.

But, and then I think for me it continues to be completely magical that there is some relationship between those patterns in the physical world that we can actually use those structures that are I think just independently really exciting to describe the universe.

That's wild.

- It is very nuts.

In fact, I got sort of like a adopted nibbling of mine, just texted the other day and was just like, "Wait, how does math, how does, how is the whole world like described by math?"

Like, did we make that up or did like math come and then we learned about the world, and I was like, oh my God, you should talk to Chandra.

I have no idea.

But it was that same.

I think that so often one of the reasons I like kind of love hearing this from you is, is because I think it's even just good to remind people that you can be, you can be like moved by science.

Like it's such a like word.

It's like such a capital S like serious like word and I think you think you have to be smart or you have to have some intellect, or you there there's like a lot of brain that's attached to it, and like any ways you can make it something other than that, like joyful, magic, like that there's other opportunities in that word other than just thinking or being smart is it's, yeah.

It's so important to share.

- I think there should be more giggling in science.

- Yeah, 100%.

- Personally, particularly I work in particle physics and cosmology.

And so nothing that we do is like immediately life or death.

Like nobody is gonna die on the table if we make the wrong decision.

I do think that there is kind of a spiritual and cultural life or death question that if we don't continue to be a society where there is a segment of the population that pursues these questions, that it will be really, there will be a cultural deficit, and that it's actually important in a functioning like global democracy that we have people who do theoretical physics, who do cosmology and particle physics.

But at the same time it's like not that serious, right?

And so I, when I was getting my PhD, I would regularly see physicists just like yelling at each other.

I saw a guy punch a chalkboard once because he got mad.

- [Molly] Wow.

- And like starts screaming.

And so one, there's a lot of passion, there's a lot of emotion and I understand that.

But also I just think people should be like having a good time.

Like we do the really cool and the weird stuff.

And like the universe is weird.

It's weird that we can use math to describe it.

The standard model of particle physics is odd because almost everything in the universe is only made of about three or four particles.

- How many particles are in the standard model?

- Oh gosh, that's a test question, I don't know the answer off the top of my head, but it's like 12-ish?

Yes.

I've never actually thought about like what's the total number, but like let's say there are six quarks, right?

And only two of them are fairly common.

Only up and down quarks are fairly common, right?

But there are four more.

And the way that the standard model is structured is such that even though most of them visible matter in the universe is only made of a few particles, we actually need all of the other particles to stabilize the entire ecosystem.

So that's odd.

That was actually, I was literally texting with some friends about that this morning.

So these are like the kinds of conversations I start on a Saturday.

It was me, I started it.

- Yeah.

They were all watching X-Men and you were like, I got something to say say.

- But I'll say that they all went for it.

And we had like a good, the three of us had like a good group text conversation.

This is, physicists have group text too, but we talk about symmetry breaking in them.

- And why we need so many quarks.

- Yeah.

It'd be fun to name a physicist group text, like to come up with whatever the chat name is.

- I think the current one, and I don't even remember how that started, is this one's called The Canadians, But it's Les Canadiens.

My French is terrible, but I don't know how that started.

There's only one Canadian in the group.

- And they feel very special.

- And he's not a Quebecer.

So I don't have a good explanation for that.

- Yeah.

So you, was it as was the path to university and to studying physics as straight and narrow as you've laid out?

Like, you were like saw thing when you were 10, made a decision when you were 11, emailed Stephen Hawking got the path to success and then did it?

- I would say for the most part it was fairly smooth sailing.

Except for my chemistry class.

I don't recommend chemistry.

You should just go right to quantum mechanics.

This is my personal take.

'cause we should just teach it as quantum physics and it makes more sense.

Sorry to any of the chemists in the audience.

- I do remember doing chemistry and then like getting to getting to a thing in chemistry where I walked in and they were basically like, and this is just how you teach science, but I walked into like a new class, you know, it was like O chem or something or organic chemistry, sorry.

And then they were like, everything you learned about chemistry is actually wrong.

Like, we're restarting.

And I was like, what?

You know, like come on.

One of the things that that say in the book is this idea I just thought was so elegant was you went, you did end up going to Hartford and you were there and you said that there was like, I mean I'm gonna paraphrase so then you correct my paraphrase.

But essentially the paraphrase is that you saw all these people who seemed very far ahead of you and one of the things you realized was that life experience can give you access to stuff.

So you seem far ahead, in a sense you seem smarter because you seem like you know more.

But in fact what you realized was that they just had time and experience that you didn't have.

And I just think it's such a lovely nuance of you can see so many people and you're like, we just say, oh, they know more so they must be smarter, versus they know more, there's another reason they know more, and that we're still on equal footing.

- Yeah.

I mean, I will say I think it was relatively smooth sailing until I got to Harvard and I was very lucky in a way that I'm a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District Magnet school system.

So I had gone to integrated schools my entire life basically.

And my high school compared to the real world was fairly idyllic.

I had this like very idyllic experience of like, I had never been around white students who had never been around students of color before.

And so I was having all of these experiences at Harvard for the first time.

And also my high school was very socioeconomically mixed and the socioeconomic status didn't necessarily map onto racial status in any clear way.

And so I was not prepared for an environment.

I had never met anyone that, you know, we would think of, well, okay, let me put it this way, Jared Kushner was one of my classmates at Harvard.

And I got in on my own merit and his parents donated $2.5 million.

- I see.

- I'm not saying he didn't get in on his own merit.

I wasn't there in the room.

I just know my parents will never have $2.5 million, much less to give away.

Right?

So it was like a completely different environment with people who had been resourced in a completely different way.

Like, I thought my high school, I had chosen my high school, I had targeted it because it was one of the best schools in Los Angeles Unified School District.

But it was also the case that my calculus class had 45 students in it, which makes it very hard to really properly teach the class.

And our classes were just totally oversized.

And suddenly I was in classrooms with people who had gone to like Exeter Academy where like, I don't know if you've ever been to Exeter.

I actually went there finally for the first time last year, and they have like a whale skeleton in their science center.

Like a real one, not a model, an actual whale skeleton.

It was just a different level of resource access that was for me, like this little Black Jewish girl from East LA was just completely unimaginable.

And suddenly I was supposed to be as intellectually well resourced as these people who had had SAT classes handed to them on a silver platter.

Whereas I trained myself to take the SAT, like my SAT score was not as high as I would've liked it, but I came by it myself, right?

And so that was, I think I also went as a 17-year-old, I had just turned 17 like a week before I left for college.

And I didn't have kind of the emotional maturity to understand, these people aren't smarter than me, they're richer than me.

- Right.

They have different.

I remember when I started science or like realized I like science or I went to a very small Catholic school until ninth grade and then I went to a very rural public high school, and I had never used a Bunsen burner before.

I didn't even know what it was.

And so I got to like the ninth grade like biology class or something and like they had been using Bunsen burners since sixth grade, and you know?

- I still haven't used one.

(audience laughs) - You know, biology, physics.

So your research now, I think it's fair like in a general way to say your research now like centers around this idea of dark matter.

You have an interesting origin story of getting there, which is again like another very iconic character sort of defined, stepped into your life.

And I'm thinking of Vera Rubin and so could you maybe tell me, tell us a little bit about Vera and then the moment she entered your world.

- Yeah, so I guess I should start by making sure everybody's on the same page about what dark matter is.

- Yes.

Yeah.

- So I mentioned earlier you might have heard me say the phrase visible matter.

And the reason that I said this is that most of the matter in the universe is not like us.

So it's kinda like a Kendrick Lamar song.

So the most of the matter in the universe is completely invisible.

So if you think about us as visible, lights reflecting off of us, we have these very bright lights and here in the pickleball courts, and most of the matter in the universe, light doesn't interact with it at all.

Or at least it's so low interaction that we've never seen any evidence of interaction.

And this governs how galaxies form, it dominates the structure of the galaxy.

There's probably some dark matter wandering around maybe in the room with us right now.

- This was my question.

I was like, okay, if we're talking about dark matter, do I have do like how, like I'm not even being facetious, but like can I, can I hold it?

Is it like how close is it to me?

- So I will say like one estimate that I've seen is like one dark matter particle per cup of coffee.

This is.

- I love, now I just wanna down this glass and like know that I've had a particle of dark matter.

- You won't have had it because it prob - it will just go right.

It will just go right through you.

But I guess I will say I'm not always a fan of that because actually an area of very active research right now is estimating what we would call the local dark matter density.

So figuring out what the distribution of dark matter, even locally in our solar system or even in our galaxy, this is like something that's an open question.

And so dark matter is not the problem that I thought I was gonna work on when I was graduating from high school.

It's not what I wrote my dissertation on.

But while I was wrapping up my dissertation, I went to a women in astronomy conference back when the federal government funded those sorts of things.

I guess people like me or why they don't wanna fund them anymore.

- Because you, because you think, you say what?

- No, I mean because like, you know, it produced women who go on to PhDs and postdocs, and faculty positions and that seems to be the thing that they don't want.

- Right now, or I should say people in the upper echelons of the executive branch specifically, there are lots of civil servants who are doing their best right now and we honor their work.

And I met Vera Rubin and I'm like, oh my god, Vera Rubin.

So she is the person who collected the data along with Kent Ford, who was an amazing instrumentalist that she was working with that first convinced the community dark matter is a real problem.

There's a lot of dark matter out there, we have to figure this problem out.

It's an astrophysics problem, it's a particle physics problem.

And so decades later I'm meeting her at this conference, and, I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna say to her.

And she's immediately like, so how do you think we solve the dark matter problem?

No small talk.

- Love that.

I love that.

- No small talk.

I'm ready for, like I did Passover Seder at your son's house once, which she was like very friendly about, but she really just wanted to talk science.

She got in there.

Yeah.

And I'm sitting there, I'm like, why would I have the answer to that question?

- How old were you at the time, do you think?

- So I must have been like at 26/27.

So this is, I'm towards the end of my PhD, but I'm working on a completely different problem, right?

So dark matter to me is like, that's somebody else's problem.

That's not my problem.

And at the time I didn't have the sense of I'm just allowed to form opinions on scientific problems even if I'm not working on them.

Like, I'm allowed, like that's something.

And so that question was really like, no, you should be broadly read and that's something that you can have an opinion on.

And that was like my first like, oh, you should think about dark matter.

- It's interesting.

It's like there's a thread here that almost goes back to your grandfather, which is like realizing you can step into a room kind of and take up space and someone saying, no, you too.

I invite you too into this space and you can do it.

- Yeah.

I definitely think there was an element of that.

And I think the conference was designed to do that, in addition to gathering people together to talk about the challenges that women in astronomy were facing.

Which was, I remember very distinctly people were presenting data about like, oh, our PhD programs are doing so well, they're almost 50% women and having to make the intervention at the conference.

I need you all to talk about race when you make these kinds of statements because most of the 50% are white women.

The numbers for women of color, particularly for Black women and Indigenous women are not really shifting that much.

- And you, like I was watching something, another interview you did and you said something like we do 2000 PhDs in physics every year and in the totality of awarding physics PhDs in this country, we've only awarded a little over 100 to Black women in physics.

- In physics and related fields.

- Yeah.

So like 2000 per year, but in all of time.

- 2000 per year, about 1,000 of those to US citizens.

And Black women who are US rooted in one way or another have since 1972 when Willie Hobbes Moore, the first African American woman to earn a PhD in physics, I think our number's around like 120 in physics and related fields.

And just to situate in historical context, the first African American man to earn a PhD in physics was in 1876.

He was actually, Edward Bouchet was the first African American to earn a PhD in the United States in any subject.

And it was in physics at Yale University.

But the first Black woman doesn't happen until almost exactly a century later.

- Wow.

There's a strain in your book and I'm like hearing you say it here of like kind of in the same way that people invited you in to different things, in the book you do a lot where you're talking directly to the reader.

There's a lot of like “you, dear reader,” and one of my colleagues described it as like, and I love this, she said it was like you were building a tent city in the middle of physics, and like telling everybody they can come.

'cause because part of part of what you're doing is saying, you know, people ask these questions of me maybe like Vera, like when you are like, oh, I don't know anything about this topic, but said you could still ask a question, and then to the reader, you're still saying, now I invite you in, you can ask these same physics questions.

Which does feel, there is a tension in that, because I'm kind of like, I don't actually know if I can't, like I don't know if I know all those questions or like the words to ask that question, but it is a strong thread.

- Yeah.

I mean I'm thinking about that conference and I'm thinking about a moment that I witnessed at the conference.

So I was very lucky that I just kind of followed Vera for the rest of that conversation, and we went into lunchtime, and so a group of us are sitting down at the table, and I remember one of my other friends from graduate school is there and we're all very excited.

We're about to have lunch with Vera Rubin, and Vera starts going, oh, we have to get Nancy, we have to get Nancy.

And she's like, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, come sit with us, and we're looking at her and we're like, okay, so it's some other older woman, we don't know who that person is.

And so Nancy comes over to the table and Vera Rubin looks at all of us and is like, do you guys know who this is?

This is Nancy Grace Roman, this is the mother of the Hubble Space telescope.

- Wow.

- And at that moment I will say like, us kids, we don't know nothing, right?

Like we did not.

And so just to situate this in context, in September, or actually I just saw the other day on August 30th, on August 30th, the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope will launch, and it is really the next great observatory from NASA.

And it is named for this incredible infrared astronomer who is the reason that we got the Hubble Space telescope.

- [Molly] That's amazing.

- So one, there was this moment of watching Vera Rubin, I'm fangirling, we're fangirling, and now she's fangirling over Nancy Grace Roman.

And there's this kind of incredible like multi-generational, and I think science should feel that way.

And I don't think that it needs to be contained in those rooms where all of us are professionals.

Science should feel that way for everybody who wants to have a relationship with science.

And it should feel that way for people who have told that they can't do science.

And my experience, and I think about like for example, my mother, and she will have no complaints about me talking about this publicly.

She's a very math-anxious person.

She doesn't feel comfortable doing arithmetic without a calculator.

And I'm thinking about like my friend Camonghne Felix, who's written a beautiful memoir called "Dyscalculia" about an actual like her experience of being disabled with numbers, and they're reversed for her.

And there are a lot of people out there who have this experience and then think, well that is a world or a part of the universe that I am cut off from that does not belong to me.

And I just don't believe that that's how the thing is.

We are a part of the universe.

Like, this is the universe here in this room with us right now.

We're made of quarks and electrons.

Only two quarks though I wanna be clear about that.

- Not all those other particles.

- Not the other, not the second generation and third generation, just first generation up and down quarks.

Very boring.

- This is, you're tapping into a deep feeling that I have about science, which is like, I'm almost like, is there a way to get rid of that word?

Like, because I feel that it is a stop gap often where people are like, whoop, that is, there's a lock on that door and I can't get in.

And to me, whenever I'm talking about science or people who say I'm like not sciencey, I'm like, you are literally like a science experiment.

Like, waking you as a body are science.

Your thoughts are science.

Waking up in the morning is science.

Going to to bed at night is science, using the internet as science.

Like, we have all these categories where it's like you're physics, I'm biology, there's chemistry which nobody should take, and like, and then, you know, but at the same, but those are like these kind of trappings that almost like humans have put on everything, and if you like, took away the labels, it's just a world that we're all living in, you know?

- I do think.

So yes, I agree.

Like we're all science in action, right?

I also do think that there is this piece that's useful to understand that science is a body of knowledge, and it is a body of knowledge that we arrive at through social processes.

I think there is this tendency to think of scientists as like, you know, lone intellectual sitting in rooms.

But actually my experience as a scholar who works in both the humanities and the sciences is that science is much more social than the humanities, because humanities disciplines are much more likely you go write a book, you sit by yourself and yeah, writing a book is a very solitary process as you know.

In the sciences we're often writing papers with several people at the same time.

It's a very social phenomenon.

There's a lot of interaction happening.

I think, and one of the arguments that I make in “The Edge of Space-Time is that science and particularly physics is a perspective on the universe that is worth having, because it just gives you another lens onto the life that you live and the lives that you are interacting with, and your political landscape as well.

And I think it's actually a great playground for thinking with abstract ideas.

And we do a lot of thinking with abstract ideas, particularly actually when we're doing politics.

We're abstracting into the future.

We're making predictions about if we elect this person, what do we think will happen?

How will that affect the lives of people around me?

And I think physics allows us to kind of exercise that muscle in our brain, but in a very low consequence environment because again, nobody's on the table dying.

But so I do think that science, understanding it as a viewpoint onto the universe that provides insight into particular elements of how the universe works can actually be a useful thing.

And it is actually quite important that as a matter I think of democracy, that that not be a perspective that stays with a small group of people.

And at the same time that there is a group of people that's tasked with keeping those stories and making sure that the next generation also has storytellers who are tasked with keeping those stories and growing them and adding onto them.

- It's funny in a way, it's like this science book, but it's like not about science at all.

It's like using science to just kind of teach people how to investigate the world and be humans.

And I would even say that when I think about the title of the book, "The Edge of Space-Time," I think I almost feel like that the most important word in the title is the edge part, is like the, throughout the entire book, but even as I'm hearing you talk, there's always a pushing up against something or which I guess maybe implies tension.

And I don't think it's always about tension.

I think there's also just like you're standing in a spot where you can see like both sides of, you know, it's like, it's like you're on the precipice and you can see what's on the left and you can see what's on the right and you're joining those things together.

- I mean I think there's a piece of this that's also as a Black feminist scholar reflecting on what Bell Hooks talked about with bringing the margin to the center.

And in the context of what Bell Hooks was talking about, she was saying, what happens if you take people who are marginalized to the edges of society and put them at the center of the story?

So putting black women at the center of the story.

And so as an example in the book, I call black holes the best laid edges in the universe.

And I don't really explain what I mean by best laid edges, because that's really like if you're, if you know something about black hair, you understand best laid edges.

And if you don't, you don't.

And that's okay.

But I wanted to actually place something that was there that's for Black readers to say, this is your story.

This is a story that belongs to you.

And so there's a piece of like what happens when we put edges at the center of the story when we put margins at the center of the story.

And you get all kinds of incredible things.

But really, like the work of science is not about what we know.

The work of science is about what we don't know.

It's about standing at the edge of what is known and pushing that boundary forward.

That is what my job is as a scientist.

Please tell the university that keeps asking us to do more bureaucratic work.

That part should not be my job.

But that's really what the job should be, right?

And so there was an element of wanting to name that.

I will also say I just, I took the, the title of the book, "The Edge of Space-Time" from a line on the first page of Stephen Hawking and George F. R. Ellis's textbook about cosmology, "The large scale structure of spacetime."

And I just thought it was poetic.

And I believe in the importance of poetry being part of the story.

And I think that we should write, we should reach for poetry when we're writing about science.

I don't think it has to be all like clipped.

And I think that there is kind of the sense that the sciences don't have an art to them.

And I just think that that's not true.

There are rules certainly, but there's a lot of art in the process of figuring out what those rules are.

- I feel like a lot of people might go into space, like, studying space to sort of, or we have this thing where you can sit and stare at the stars and you're sort of doing a form of, one can be doing a form of almost like escapism or like looking out, but it feels like in this way for you actually, like looking at the very edges, looking at the beginning of the universe, thinking about like the invisible matter that's not there.

Like looking out actually really grounds you in the earth as opposed to like having you escape from it.

- I absolutely think that thinking with physics can be very motivating in terms of, especially in this moment when I think a lot of people are having a lot of difficulty.

A lot of people feel like they're under attack.

I'm thinking about trans children in particular who have been so put upon by people who aren't thinking about their humanity and are using them as political tools, and using their existence as an excuse to attack civil rights.

That I want them to know that neutrinos, which are subatomic particles, are non-trinary.

They randomly oscillate between identities as they're flying through space and time.

Particles are fundamentally non-binary.

I didn't really think about this, 'cause they're they're particles and waves at the same time.

Amrou Al-Kadhi, an Iraqi British drag queen was the person that I first heard articulate that.

And I need our kids to know that they reflect the logics of the universe.

In a sense, like particle physics doesn't have anything to do with gender, but at the same time these logics are there.

So when someone comes and tells you like, oh, this is what's normal, I'm, who's to say?

Not neutrinos, neutrinos are like, "We don't know normal."

Right?

There's all kinds of stuff happening in quantum physics.

So the other thing is, is that physics teaches us that the universe is always more queer and strange than we thought it was.

And it is important to remember that sense of possibility, particularly when you have authoritarians telling you that this is the end, and our way is the only way.

Physics is part of how we imagine that the universe is bigger and better than the bad things that are happening to us, which I have to credit my mom Margaret Prescod for first framing it that way for me, that people need to know that the universe is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.

And that's one of the reasons I write, and I write to that audience.

And I think that that audience is the one that is often told the most that they don't belong in science.

And so I just wanna say, you are in science already.

And what we find I think as scientists in our conversations is that people always have questions.

They're always curious about something science.

I have yet to meet someone who is like not about science.

- Happy Pride, y'all.

- Happy Pride.

- Happy Pride.

Everyone give it up for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

(audience clapping) - Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

(inspirational music)