3 Things I Learned from ‘The Disordered Cosmos’

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s 2021 book on physics and identity

When Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was a student, she only ever had one Black professor (a man) and “didn’t meet a Black woman with a PhD in physics until I was almost done with college.” That’s because only about fifty Black women in the United States before her had earned a PhD in physics. Prescod-Weinstein went on to become the first Black woman anywhere to earn her physics PhD specifically in theoretical cosmology; as such, she is also the first Black woman to become a tenure-track professor in that specialty. She identifies, by the way, as “a Black woman and an agender person.”

What insights has she gained from this perspective? For one thing, as she writes in The Disordered Cosmos, she was astonished to realize one day “that I had never before been curious about the specific interaction of light with human skin.” This insight happened (or, rather, didn’t happen for a long time) because “artificial social structures have conditioned you not to ask basic and rather obvious questions.” In The Disordered Cosmos, she shares not only her insights, but also her meta-insights about why people do and don’t reach certain insights.

Here are three things I learned from her new book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey…