Factually! with Adam Conover - Dark Matter and More with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

This week Adam is joined by theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss what the hell dark matter actually IS and how much we know about it, why being a particle physicist is not just about making things up, and how much better not just science, but human life would be if everyone had equal access to the beautiful project of understanding the natural world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert from around the world of human knowledge about all the amazing shit that they know, that I don't know, and that you might not know. We are going to have so much fun on today's episode learning about dark matter and a bunch of other really cool physics shit.

But first, a little bit of housekeeping. I want to remind you that you can support this show on Patreon. Just head to patreon.com slash adamconover for five bucks a month. You get every episode of this podcast ad-free. You can also join our community Discord, and I will upload early versions of my new YouTube videos there so you get to see them before anybody else. But if that's not enough for you, I want to remind you, you can also see me live. I am on tour once again this year

and I just added a bunch of new dates. March 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Austin, Texas at the Cap City Comedy Club. May 5th and 6th, I'll be in San Francisco at Cobb Comedy Club. May 11th through 13th,

I'll be in San Antonio, Texas at the LOL Comedy Club. And from June 8th to 10th, I'll be in Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago at the LOL Comedy Club. And from June 8th to 10th, I'll be in Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago at the Comedy Vault. You can get tickets at adamconover.net. I very much hope to see you there. Now, let's get to today's episode. You know, science, as much as I love it, and I truly, truly do, it can sometimes be a bit too austere and bloodless, you know? In trying to probe the deepest questions of reality,

science can end up ping-ponging around a table of hyper-mathematical, logical, and rational statements. It can get absurdly technical and abstruse in ways that are difficult for regular people to understand. Science is a conceptual toolkit for humans to use, but it's way too easy for it to lose the human element. You know, at the end of the day, we can forget that science is something that humans do and that regular people just walking around their non-scientific lives need to understand and need to use to make sense of the

world that they live in. That is the purpose of science, or at least that is the purpose it originally had for us as humans. And if it doesn't have that purpose anymore, we need to ask why are we doing it or why are we doing it the way that we are? Yeah, I'll give you an example of this, an example of science being, you know, just a little bit too technical and hard to wrap my hands around as a person. Let's talk about dark matter. I've never really been comfortable with the concept of dark matter. You know, you go to the planetarium and they tell you that 20% of the universe is dark matter. What the fuck? What does that mean? You can't see dark matter. You can't touch it. It doesn't

interact with stuff that I can see around me in the normal ways that stuff should interact. It's just math and mathematical inference tells us it's there. And unless I can do the math, which, newsflash, I can't because I'm a comedian, not a scientist, well, why should I care about dark matter? What does it mean to me? What can it mean to me? I'm not saying that dark matter is stupid or it doesn't exist for that reason. I'm talking about the way it's presented to me. What am I supposed to think and feel about now that I know this about

the universe? And you know, it's not just the products of science that can feel separate from who we are. It can be the process of science, the people, the institutions, the bureaucracy. Just to take one example, science is more white and more male than the population at large. If you look at who is actually paid to do science today. And there are those out there who say, who gives a shit? Why does it matter who does the science as long as the answer is right?

And you know what? I disagree with that, because putting it that way ignores the humanity of science. It treats science as something out there, something objective and rational and non-human, when in fact science is something that we humans do, and we do it for ourselves, and we do it for each other. And if science therefore doesn't reflect the variety of humanity, then science is therefore impoverished. Science is less than it should be, it's less useful, and it's less full of humanity than

it needs to be. And you don't need to take it from me, okay? There is concrete evidence that we lose out from science being mainly done by white dudes. We know for a fact that women and minority researchers often come up with more novel ideas and that more diversity in research groups means more scientific innovation. Our lack of diversity is quite literally holding science back, and a science that looks more like all of us is a better science. But, as my guest today reminded me, we don't need to ask if science is going to be better

to understand why it is important to have everyone be a part of science, because, again, science is a fundamental human activity as much as art or poetry or comedy or any other human pursuit. And that means that if some humans are cut off from it, that is bad for humanity, not just for science. And look, you know, one of the reasons I love talking to scientists is because for me, it is a tonic to this viewpoint that science is some sort of hyper-rational non-human thing. Because when you talk to a scientist, you remember that it is people who do the work. It is individual humans that are doing it because they love it and they care about it.

And it's always a gift to be able to have that experience, to talk to a scientist and realize that they feel it in their soul and that their scientific work reflects their personality, because how could it not? So today, to that end, we have an absolutely wonderful person and guest on to talk to us about all of this, to talk to us about dark matter and why we should give a shit about it, about why we should give a shit about who's able to do science, and about how limiting who does science screws over people and makes science worse. Her name is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. She's a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire and an advocate for diversity in science. And she's the author of the new book,

The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey Into Dark Matter, Space-Time, and Dreams Deferred. This was one of my favorite conversations I have had in months. I know you're going to love it. It's just beautiful. So let's get right to it. Please welcome Chanda Presgod Weinstein. Chanda, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Tell us a little bit about yourself to start. You describe yourself in your book as a particle cosmologist. What does that mean? So broadly speaking, I'm interested in the origin and evolution of space time and everything that's inside of it. And I particularly like to look at this through the lens of particle physics. So basically like everything,

but don't ask me questions about planets. Okay. Like don't ask you questions about plants. That's too specific to you. Yeah. Too, yeah, it's like simultaneously too large and too small, basically. Yeah. Right, because particle physics is very, very small. Extreme. But cosmology is very, very large. Extreme.

Right? Yes. How do these things, like, how do these be part of the same story when they're at such divergent ends of the scale spectrum? In the very early universe, so what we call early universe cosmology, we're very concerned with the particular evolution of particles because they're dominating what's happening in the early universe. And so really trying to understand the origin and evolution of structure requires going back to the beginning, right? So going back to the very basic building blocks. I've become particularly interested in the dark matter question. And so dark matter is this stuff that's out there. It's most of the normally gravitating matter in the

universe, but we can't see it. We can't touch it, we've never handled it in a lab, anything like that. But it plays a really significant role in how galaxies evolve and even the formation of stars, et cetera, in the early universe. And so that requires thinking about things at the microphysical level, at the particle level, because we expect that dark matter is a type of particle. So let's just focus on dark matter, because we expect that dark matter is a type of particle. So let's just focus on dark matter. Cause we've discussed physics on the show a couple of times. We've never gotten into dark matter. I've always been very curious. So can I, can I tell you my dumb, dumb understanding of dark matter? And then you tell me what I've got wrong. Is that an okay place to start? Yes. Okay. So my understanding is it's one of those things where physicists are like, okay, so we're, we've got all our equations that are describing the universe.

We're very certain about our equations. Our equations show us there must be a lot more matter out there. But as you say, we can't see it, we can't touch it, right? We've not detected it. How do we know that we didn't just fuck the math up? That's what I've always wanted to know. I mean. I understand that you're very certain about it, but if, if we've been for decades, right. Uh,

knowing about this, but yet not still seeing it and touching it. Um, where, where is the gap? I mean, if you want to be fringe, like fringe, I would always love to be free. I'm going to get myself in trouble. So really there are two, Oh, get into trouble. Get into trouble. There are two solutions to this problem, right? So we looked, really the first substantive evidence for the existence of dark matter was Vera Rubin and Kent Ford looking at how fast stars were orbiting the centers of galaxies. And when they calculated how fast they were orbiting, as you get further from the center of the galaxy, they were going too fast. And this is almost actually like a frosh physics problem. Like this is something that we might give to our first year students because you can match how much matter there is and how fast something is orbiting. This is like Newtonian physics, right? And so there's this mismatch. So there are two options here. One, we've really fucked up our

theory of gravity. Like we just don't understand. One, we've really fucked up our theory of gravity. We just don't understand. We're not filtering through the right theory of gravity. Or the alternative is that there's more matter there than we can see. Because the other way that we're measuring how much mass a galaxy has is by looking at how much light it's emitting. And we can correlate the brightness of the galaxy with the mass of the galaxy. it's emitting and we can correlate the brightness of the galaxy with the mass of the galaxy. Okay.

So we're basically doing two, we're basically measuring how much matter there is in a galaxy in two different ways and they should give you the same answer and they don't. Right. And so it could be that maybe we don't understand our theory of gravity and there are people who actively research in this area, which I just called fringe, which like I actually usually have like a professional rule that I don't do that, but I'm like salty about various things this week. This is where people come for spicy physics takes. This is the brand of the show. Don't, don't stress you're, you're in a good home here for your fringe takes. Um, uh, okay. So there, but, so there are folks who think that maybe the issue is in the other direction,

but the more common view is that there's this kind of matter that doesn't show up via light. But I mean, this is basic Newtonian physics. This isn't even crazy quantum stuff or whatever. This is like, hey, the planets are literally rotating at the wrong speed based on how much matter we can see. Right. And so actually we can think of examples in our own solar system. I just said, don't talk to me about planets. So I'm not even going to name one here, right? Where people were saying things aren't moving correctly. There must be another planet there. And indeed there was actually another planet, right? And so you can use gravitation and the dynamics of the system is actually one lens that we look at the universe through is actually by seeing the impact that objects are having on each other through gravitation. So actually, I will say that one of the arguments that we have in the physics community is about the question of the word detection.

And this is an interesting sort of technical point, which is that often people will say we've never detected dark matter. I may have even actually said that a few minutes ago, I don't remember. But we have in the sense that we have a plethora of evidence that's difficult to explain without inputting this idea of a new particle. So the challenge that the modified Newtonian dynamics people face, MOND is the term broadly for people who just think that we got gravity wrong, is that there is no other evidence that gravity doesn't work. And it's actually one of our, it may be at this point, our best tested theory in terms of the scale and the number of significant digits we've gone out to with G, that we feel fairly confident. It's a theory.

It's a marvelous, beautiful, like Einstein's gravity. It's a beautiful theory that also, if you tweak it a little bit, a lot of things change. And we're not seeing those effects elsewhere. And so they have to come up with a model that only changes things for the purposes of how these stars are moving and various other things like gravitational lensing, where space-time gets turned into a funhouse mirror for light, basically. There are a bunch of things that you need to be able to explain that dark matter does beautifully that it's harder to do if you change your theory of gravity.

I see. Because the theory of gravity is going to, it's more general. It's going to affect more different situations if you change that theory, but we're only seeing the, that dark matter gap in certain cases. So if you change gravity, if you change the whole equation for the whole universe, then now you've got a problem with a bunch of other scenarios where we don't have a problem. But if you change the theory, then you have to take those into account. Can I just say, I'm already loving the way you explain this stuff because the problem with, I find so often talking to people who study physics, which by the way, my sister is one of them.

My sister has a PhD in particle physics. She's now a science journalist at the wonderful magazine Science News. She writes about physics and reports on it. But, you know, the problem that I've always had talking to her, anybody else with particle physics, is that you have an intimate knowledge of something that I would have to probably spend as much time as you to understand. If I'm talking to somebody who's a musicologist, right, I can at least experience music and they can tell me a lot more than I know about how music works, but I can go listen to some Bach, but I can't firsthand experience the beauty of Einstein's, you know, gravity, as you say, without studying it extensively. So it can be a little bit hard. Me as the dilettante, the guy who likes to understand a little bit about everything. Physics is always a little bit hard to get into, and I feel like I'm understanding it very clearly talking to you, which I really appreciate. Well, I think one thing I want to say is actually, I do think you can get some nice visuals, particularly for general relativity. I encourage everyone to use their favorite search engine to look up gravitational lensing and maybe look up Hubble Space Telescope and the phrase gravitational lensing.

Also, the recently launched JWST, which I call Just Wonderful Space Telescope, had this beautiful, beautiful deep field image. That's what it was called. And it has all this gravitational lensing, which I mentioned is where space-time gets turned into a funhouse mirror. And basically what's happening is light is traveling to us over a long distance from like a galaxy, say. And because there's so much dark matter between that galaxy and us, that the space-time gets bent and the light travels in funny ways and you literally get multiple images of the galaxy in in the image and that's something that you can visualize that's really hard to explain with modifications of gravity because general relativity predicts it exactly like in detail

got it so if we if we want to change our notion of gravity hey we got the equation wrong then we would need a new explanation or at least a modified explanation of something that we already understand very well. So sort of like Occam's razor, that would then indicate the presence of dark matter. Okay. So in that case, what I'd love to know is what do we know about dark matter? You said we haven't seen it. We can't touch it. Um, but yet it is indicated in these, uh, you know, in these measurements. Um, so what do we know about it? So we know that it's completely dominant. So we tend to think of, you know, you see an image of a galaxy and you're like, that's the whole galaxy. It's just like, you know, some spiral arms and making it sound less cool than galaxies. Galaxies are awesome. No offense to any galaxies that may

be listening right now. And I live in one and I love mine. Right. Milky Way, we're cool. But actually every single galaxy lives in a dark matter halo and the dark matter halos are much more massive than the luminous part of the galaxy. So when we look at the night sky, we're actually seeing a very small fraction of what's out there. There's a lot more going on than what's apparent to us. So I think that's one of the things that we know about dark matter is that actually, like, you can't really build a galaxy without dark matter, at least in our universe. That's not how it happened. And I think sometimes, you know, dark matter kind of gets the short end of the stick in terms of the storytelling, because astronomers who don't think about dark matter tend to be the ones who dominate talking about this. talking about this. So I actually like recently gave a talk at the American Astronomical Society where I was like in front of an audience of like, I don't know, a thousand people where it was like,

you guys can't do galaxies without dark matter. I just want to remind you that this is actually like an astrophysical problem. In what sense is it like, like the gravity doesn't work, like the galaxy would fall apart because, you know, things aren't being held together by gravity or like what, if there was, if you tried to build a galaxy without dark matter, what would happen? Or do you mean you can't describe a galaxy without dark matter? So what I mean is certainly I don't know if there are other universes out there, maybe you can. Certainly you can form galaxies. Right. So you can have things that are gravitationally attracted, mostly hydrogen. Right.

And stars will start to form and you'll get dust and all of that. But the universe that we see where galaxies are organized in clusters in the way that they are, or even in the case, you know, the Milky Way has probably almost 60 satellite galaxies. So there's the Milky Way and then it's got a bunch of little galaxies that are hanging out. Maybe the one most familiar to people would be the Large Magellanic Cloud, if you've heard of the Large Magellanic Cloud. That's one of our satellites. It's hanging out in our potential well, really, our gravitational well. And that picture looks the way that it does because of the dynamics that all of those galaxies are having with dark matter. It's not just what we will call the luminous matter we call baryons. It's not just

baryons. It's also dark matter. So if you want to make, you know, fantasy galaxy, do what you want, put whatever ingredients you want into it. But if you want galaxy in the cosmos that we live in, then you have to concern yourself with dark matter. You can't just ask when the Milky Way and Andromeda collide, which is going to happen at some point. No, really? Yeah. You can actually, this is something else. Actually, you can probably find this on the Hubble Space Telescope website.

something else actually you can probably find this on the hubble space telescope website there's actually um people have created images that kind of project what the night sky would look like when the milky way and andromeda are colliding with each other cool i assume this is going to happen in billions of years this is this is a long time or is it a couple years no i mean and the other thing i should say right we have this colloquial understanding of the word collide like you think about like two cars hitting each other or something like this. Yeah. But this is going to be a much more elegant kind of like things coming together. Like there isn't going to be any violent smashing.

Like there isn't going to be anything like that. But in the scenario where you want to model those two things happening, you can't just think about the stars and the gas. You also have to think about how the dark matter halos are going to interact with each other and shape how everything else moves. So where is dark matter? Like, is there dark matter around me now? And is it evenly distributed? Or is it like you keep saying a halo? it in you know in our galaxy is it in specific places or is it everywhere what a dumb dumb sounding no no no i mean so first of all it's inside of you right now um what there is there's a possibility that there may be some dark matter inside of you wow i mean there are also neutrinos flying through you you're fine sure i'm aware of

this i've known that for years and so i've come to peace with the neutrinos flying through you. You're fine. I'm aware of this. I've known that for years. And so I've come to peace with the neutrinos. But dark matter, I'm like, OK, at every moment, there's lots of little tiny particles flying through me and they don't interact. And I've heard this one before. But I actually have no idea if I'm trying to picture dark matter where it is or what it looks like. It looks like nothing. I know that. But sorry, please go on. So it's definitely the case that looking at gravitational dynamics and other pieces of

information, we can estimate what possible densities of dark matter there are in our local solar system. And this is an area of research that people focus on. We do think we have a measurement that we call a density profile, which is basically like how the density depends on where you are in the galaxy or in the halo. And so we actually think that there's a relatively like strong concentration in the core of a galaxy and that it, but it also takes a really long time to kind of tail off. So it exists well beyond where the luminous, the visible part of a galaxy stops.

So there is some variation in the density but roughly speaking, you know, we have this joke in physics, approximate this cow as a sphere. You can kind of do the same thing with the dark matter halo it's like you're reducing it down a bit um but uh i guess this is starting to beg the question for me like what in what sense is dark matter matter because my again my colloquial understanding of matter is that like

it has some sort of okay i'm actually going to go back to my fucking philosophy bachelor's degree but that it's somehow like i know i know i know the record show i'm making a face she's making a face she's like don't bring bachelor's level philosophy into this so so something that like philosophers in the 18th century that the concept they would use is something being extended in space that it's just like in space at all um and so i think of matter as being a thing that i can collide with even air i know i you know it moves around or whatever but that it somehow physically interacts with other stuff that's matter um and yet like i dark matter that doesn't seem to be the case at least not in a way that i that i directly can

interact with so in what sense is it matter? Does this question make sense? Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say when you're not guaranteed an interaction, right. I think that that's actually the key piece. So we can go back to neutrinos, which neutrinos are what we would categorize as visible matter, because we have a way of detecting them and actually like interacting with them but it's pretty hard right so one of the ways that we do it is that we get these like giant tanks of extremely clean water underground and try and get a neutrino to interact with something right i'm otherwise actually bananas produce neutrinos

and through bananas produce neutrinos. Bananas produce neutrinos? Yes. I actually, you can find some, there's a radio episode where I talk about this. But yes, your banana is a neutrino production machine because of potassium decay. It's actually, it's a nuclear phenomenon. Bananas are totally safe. I don't want anyone panicking. Let there be no banana panic.

So neutrinos are- This is going to end up on TikTok in a second. Someone's going to be like, bananas, neutrinos come out of them. There's going to be some guy in a grocery store holding up bananas. We can't eat these anymore. It's going to be like banana radiation poisoning. We're in that cultural moment. But you can think of like neutrinos go through you and there's really no effect. microwave background radiation, which is light that has been traveling freely through space-time since the universe was only about 400,000 years old, which I know sounds really old, right? But

the universe is like, you know, almost around 14 billion years old. So that's actually like 400,000 is like baby steps, right? Like it's very young. It is a microwave, right? So that's not really something that we don't really have any strong interactions with. So you're not guaranteed an interaction. That said, we actually do have experiments that are hoping to find some interaction between dark matter and what we would call standard model, like particles that we already know about. And that's actually, that's actually something that I don't work on that, but other people are trying to work on that. I've been much more focused on, we know that we can see the effects of dark matter through astrophysical observations. So how much can we learn about dark matter just using those astrophysical observations without, you don't want me in a lab. That's like the short

version is you don't want me in a lab. So astrophysical observations, meaning what, the way that it affects the way astronomical objects move through gravity? Because we know that dark matter does interact with gravity, right? Am I correct? Yes. So it gravitates just like everyday matter. And so that's actually part of what's kind of weird and strange about it is that it gravitates just like we do, but it doesn't do anything else the way that we do. Like light goes right through it. It really shouldn't be called dark matter. It should be probably called invisible matter or transparent matter because it doesn't have a color. Like light just goes right through it, right? So when I talk about, you know, using astrophysical probes, for example,

how many satellites should the Milky Way have? And how does that relate to how massive the Milky Way is? That that becomes a question of how did the dark matter interact gravitationally and how did the dark matter interact with itself? So this is, I guess, my research group. I shouldn't say I guess. My research group is expert on this question in relation to one particular dark matter particle, the axion. And so, you know, to go back to your very first question, really the thing that interests me most is how we can use the very large to understand the very small. So can I look at, if I tell a computer basically these are the equations for this dark matter particle, show me what a dark matter halo looks like. use, for example, the Vera C. Rubin telescope observatory is going to be taking first light next year, Vera Rubin being one of the people who first found the substantive evidence for dark matter, right? So now we're going to have that telescope looking at satellites, and it's going

to help us get a better understanding of whether those satellites look the way our simulations tell us they will look, if we're getting the numbers that we expect to see, etc. And so we can do that matching. And that might tell us, okay, this dark matter model is consistent with these observations, or only if I adjust the mass of the particle or some other parameter of the particle. And then that actually, that's what we call a constraint that tells me what the dark matter isn't and it allows me to pare down my options a little bit. Oh, okay. Look, you are right. Dark matter has had a bad rap

because I literally for my whole life, dark matter had been presented to me as almost just like physicists fudging the numbers, going, ah, the equations didn't work out. There must be a bunch of dark matter around. We don't know anything about it. It's just, ah, there must be some, you can't, oh, don't look for it.

You can't see it. It's just, trust us, you know? And what you're describing is like, no, this is a type of matter that we can, you know, it only interacts with the rest of the universe in a few ways that we can detect so far. But there's a lot we can say about it using those means. I mean, if you're literally coming up with, OK, here's what we think the particle is here.

Here's how we think it works. Let's create a model of how that would interact and where the dark matter would be. And then you're looking through a telescope and seeing it. Well, that's I get it. That's matter. It's and I. It's real. I didn't actually, I guess I kind of didn't answer that question. But yeah, it is, I expect it to be a tangible physical phenomenon in the same way that we are tangible physical phenomena and the

particles that we are made of are tangible physical phenomena. I don't think that there's anything, I'm esoteric about that. If I was still working on cosmic acceleration and the dark energy question, then we could maybe get into the problems there. But I work on dark matter now, so I don't have to worry about problems like that. I mean, that said, I think the interesting thing is we're in a really exciting decade right now because JWST has recently launched. VeriC Reuben Observatory is going to start taking first light probably in 2024. The camera on it, the facility is looking like amazing.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is going to be launching before the decade is out. And for people who don't know who Nancy Grace Roman was, she's basically the mother of Hubble. We get Hubble Space Telescope because Nancy got it for us. So we have all these amazing telescopes. And a lot of them, the science driver that was made to like the federal agencies was actually about dark energy or neutrinos. But in order to understand this other science, dark matter is an important piece because it's literally a quarter of the matter energy content in the universe. Wow. It's about a quarter, maybe a fifth. And so you're saying when these new telescopes go online, we'll be able to make those comparisons that you were talking about. And we'll be able to like know a lot more about dark matter when that happens. Yes. So, and I look at these particular, like, I'm very interested in these

questions of satellites and sub halos that the satellite galaxies live inside because each satellite galaxy has its own little dark matter halo that we call a sub halo. So you just got, it's, it's, it's halos all the way down, basically. But we have this very interesting picture. So I'm interested in that. One of the directions that I'm moving in, and in particular, my postdoctoral researcher in my group, Dr. Nathan Musoki, has been leading a project where he's thinking about gravitational lensing. So we're also going to be getting a lot of information about gravitational lensing. And again, we can ask the question,

does this lensing look different in different dark matter models? And therefore can we use observations of gravitational lensing to simplify the list of models that we have to think about? And so for me as a theoretical physicist, it's really fun to kind of work at that interface of observation and, you know, making shit up for a living, which is kind of, I think, again,

given all the attacks on theoretical physics, I think I'm not supposed to say that because apparently like it sucks and it's not cool, but I like that part of the job. Well, oh my God. I have to ask you what you mean by that, and I love talking to you and I can't wait to keep doing it. But we have to take a really quick break.

We'll be right back with more Chanda Prescott Weinstein. Okay, we're back with Chanda Prescott Weinstein. You just said all the attacks on theoretical physics. What attacks do you, I'm not attacking theoretical physics. Who's attacking it? So, you know, I'm not going to name names, but there have been some op-eds that have been floating around recently in newspapers that should probably know better that have basically made claims about how particle physicists, all we do is make things up and we don't even care and we're just doing it because we want to get publications out and get grant money. And it's such a cynical way of interpreting the work that we do, which is creative. I really, I don't see what we do as different from kind of artistic work

where it's our task to think about the possibilities of how things come together, and then to put them together on paper mathematically and test them out and see if they match with the universe that we actually live in. So I actually, until the kind of recent round of attacks on us, I would be like, yeah, I get to make things up for a living. And part of my job is a lot of my job is actually coming up with things that might be wrong. But what if they're not? Then it's really exciting and it's really interesting. But science is about what we don't know. It's not about what we do know.

My job as a scientist is to live at the boundary of what is known and unknown and try and push that forward. Yeah. Something that always stuck with me was when the Large Hadron Collider went online for the first time. Or is it Hadron? I don't know. I'm going to say it. Don't correct me. Hadron. Okay. All right. Fine. Fine, Chanda. I'll say Large Hadron Collider. scientists were talking about what they what they hoped to see was that they were like we hope we get some results that we can't explain we hope that we get we hope that the results we get prove that one of our formulas one of our models is incorrect because that means there'll be more work to do if it just goes through if the experiment happens it says yeah everything you already thought is right then we'll all be sad because there'll be no new frontiers of science for us to explore, at least in that particular area. I love that sort of anticipation and excitement for

having something that you can't explain, something that contradicts what you thought you knew is really cool about physics in particular. So I think they were being a little bit dramatic. And actually, we're getting our asses kicked by that a little bit, right? Because they detected the Higgs boson, which was very exciting, but it was also something that had been predicted. And then basically, nothing is broken like the standard model is in some sense in very good condition and so i think all of that public messaging about like we better find something or else was was maybe a mistake i wasn't involved it's not my fault i'm i wasn't even supposed to be here today no it's like like i won't make you answer for all of physics. Don't worry. But I do think, you know,

one of the things that we don't talk to the general public about is that actually the standard model isn't perfect. And I think we don't do a good enough job of talking about that. And I actually probably have to be careful about what I say about this because I'm on a national academies committee right now that's mapping out the future of particle physics for the next 30 to 50 years. That's our task. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's cool on paper for sure.

Cool on paper, not cool in real life. The meetings are probably kind of boring. Yeah, that's a lot of, you know, it's meetings. So meetings are probably kind of boring. Yeah, that's a lot of, you know, it's meetings. So meetings are meetings. But I actually do think the task that we've been given is really, really exciting. And I think one of the complications is that colliders are not the only way we do particle physics, right? Like we do neutrino detection. We still don't understand math, like even on paper, why neutrinos have mass.. The standard model that we can write down in the best way doesn't have mass for the neutrinos, but we also know that neutrinos have mass.

So there are things like that that are still unresolved. This is connected to the fact that neutrinos are non-trinary. This is how I talk about it. They literally oscillate between three different types of neutrino just kind of randomly as they're flying along. So you can have like an electron neutrino and then it goes somewhere else and it has turned into a muon neutrino. And that's the thing that neutrinos do. We don't have a good mathematical model that is verified as an explanation for how that happens. In the case of the dark matter particle I work on, the axion, the reason that the axion is a

well-motivated dark matter model is because it's a side effect of a solution to a problem we have in the standard model. So we can write down a piece of an equation in quantum chromodynamics. So this is the part of the standard model that governs quarks. And there's no argument for why that part of the equation shouldn't be there. And usually we have a mathematical reason, like it doesn't obey some rule that we've put in place already. Nothing tells us it can't be there. The only problem is it causes physical effects in the neutron that nobody's ever seen in the lab. So this is a situation where we don't have a good mathematical explanation for why we're not seeing that effect on the neutron.

But we're not seeing that effect on the neutron. So the standard model is beautiful. And I would never, you know, it's a work of art. And we should be really proud of it. I would never imp know it's it's it's a work of art and we should be really proud of it but you in the standard model i would never understand the standard model but but it's not it's not done because also where's gravity there's no gravity there's no gravity in the standard model no but i but i've But I'm experiencing gravity right now. How do you have a model with no gravity in it? I mean, are you sure you've been experiencing gravity?

Have you talked to someone about that? I'm pretty sure when I jump, I come back down. But it could be something else. It could be magnetism. I could be made of metal. I don't know. I don't understand physics that well. But no, gravity is somewhat separate from the standard model.

Is that correct? I mean, so the standard model explains three of the four major forces. And there's an assumption that we should be able to bring gravity into that. But the quantum gravity problem is a big outstanding problem. There are people who would debate whether that's a particle physics problem or not. But frankly, I'm not a fan of people getting into their little bubbles and saying, well, this is my fiefdom and it's not related to your fiefdom. It's one universe. Yeah. And ideally, we want these theories to connect and we want to know how they influence each other.

Something that you write about in your book though, is the fact that sometimes even when the model is very complete, describing something that it still leaves us with like a why at the end that when we're like learning about it, we're still sort of like, you know, okay. You're writing about I believe like neutrons being, we're still sort of like, you know, okay, you're writing about, I believe like neutrons being made up of quarks and like, okay, we can describe that that's the case. But, you know, our sort of like human surface level, just walking around brain sort of wants to know like, okay, well, you've described everything, but like, why is it like that? That

there's still some like mystery at the core of it in a way. Does that, does that make sense? Or was I misunderstanding your writing? Yeah, I definitely think, you know, some of this is a question of what do we think physics can tell us and what do we think that the goals of physics should be? And so one example is, okay, if neutrons and protons weren't made out of quarks in the way that they are, like we would physically be different, right? Our universe would physically be different. Neutrons and protons play a really important role in nuclear fusion in the sun. And we don't exist without nuclear fusion in the sun, right?

And so it actually matters that, so the electron is a fundamental particle. It's not made out of other particles, but it actually is of great significance to the existence of life on earth as we understand it, that the proton and neutron actually are composite particles and are not fundamental particles. That property makes a huge difference in our lives because there are all these fusion processes that happen in part because of that, right? So I think that's one way of thinking about it. I happen to be teaching a graduate introduction

to quantum mechanics right now. That's what I was doing at 9 o'clock this morning. And teaching quantum is really interesting, because it's a topic where there's a lot of math, and there's a lot of calculations that we can do. And then there are still these like really basic questions that we don't really have good answers to, which is like, what does it mean to take a measurement? That's like, I actually had to kind of contain my lecture notes on this question, because I have, I have real, I mean, even the question of like what counts as real material, but there's calculational abilities that they have to have when they're done with my class. And thinking about the question of what counts as a measurement in quantum mechanics doesn't help them with that.

But yet it's a question that like when you're working with the material, it comes to you very naturally, right? That like, okay, when you, I mean, I know I'm going to butcher it, but a pretty fundamental concept of quantum mechanics is that to measure something is to change it. And so you're like, well, why is that the case? And it depends on the definition of measurement, right? And like, so isn't it the case that if someone's sitting in that class of yours and you're just trying to teach them the math, they're going to start wondering about that question naturally, aren't they? So I actually worry a little bit about a bait and switch that happens in physics. Correct me, please. I've written about this a couple of times in my last couple of columns for New Scientist, partly because it was on my mind a lot as I prepared this course.

Quantum mechanics is a subject that students who go on to a graduate degree see twice. So you see it as an undergraduate and then you see it again as a graduate student. And when you're teaching it to undergraduates, the focus is really on teaching them to solve certain types of equations that are going to be important and giving them the basics of here are some like toy physical systems that you need to understand how quantum mechanics works. And so you want them to have a sense of, you know, quantized energy levels and how those connect to the picture of the atom that we have. But the reason that students walk into our physics classrooms is often, like, you choose physics major because, like, I don't know, you read Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity or something like that. And you were like, this is awesome. I want to think about all of these deep questions.

Yeah. Frankly, Lee is one of the very few physicists who's at the level of seniority that he's at who still asks and thinks about these fundamental questions. It's very rare for a physicist to get the opportunity to do that. But we come on podcasts and we're like, yeah, the measurement problem. We have all of these very esoteric questions. And then you get into the classroom and they're just like, no, let's solve this differential equation. So I'm the harmonic oscillator. And then like here is like the square potential well in one dimension and the square potential well in two dimensions. I'm bad because I'm making that stuff sound like it's not students.

If you're a physicist, please care about that. And don't make your graduate instructor suffer. I'm sure that's plenty of fun. But people are like, hey, what happened to all the cool Galaxy Brain podcast stuff? And we don't, that's something that you got to do on your free time. You can't get paid to do that. There are really very few people on the planet who get paid to think about those questions. And part of it is that funding agencies won't put the money down for it.

Because you don't get a nuclear bomb out of that. I mean, like, frankly, like that's the short version is you don't get quantum computers and nuclear bombs out of thinking about some of these, like, well, maybe, yeah, even the quantum competing people aren't necessarily spending a lot of time on it. So, yeah. I mean, I really wanted to get there because I know that's something you cover in your book is the way that you know science does interact with state power for example that you know the the the physics program that we develop you know the incredible progress we've made in understanding the fundamental building blocks of the universe came about because you know we needed to kill a whole lot of people or at least somebody in charge wanted to kill a whole lot of people, or wanted the ability to in order to achieve some very non-cosmic global foreign policy objectives. And that's a

weird fact about science that we don't really acknowledge enough. And I think this is going to help move us into the whole other topic of your book and a lot of your writing. So how do you think about that very strange, dark secret, right? You keep talking about dark things as it pertains to physics. Yeah. One of the strange things about being a particle physicist who spends time thinking about history is being aware of the fact that my field and in a really big way in the United States is an outgrowth of the Manhattan Project. And I think nuclear weapons suck, and we should get rid of all of them. And we're in this like terrible situation where they're actually hard to get rid of, right? Because like, once you have the nuclear waste,

it's a whole problem, right? Yeah. And so part of being, in my opinion, an ethical physicist is being conscious of the complexity and of the history that's at our backs. And I'm trying to learn lessons from it. And so in fact, just coming back to the quantum mechanics course I'm teaching right now, I decided I wanted to open the class with a particular experiment that I think is not discussed enough. It's something called the Stern-Gerlach experiment. I'm hoping to come up with a way to talk about it for the general public in my next book, because it's frankly, it's not even something people try and write up because it's such a technical quantum mechanical thing.

And as I was preparing for it, I was reading a lot about the experiment and how the experiment was done. So it's named after Stern and Gerlach. Stern was a Jew and Gerlach went on to head the Nazi nuclear weapon program. Right. So I'm thinking about what does it mean for me to teach this in the classroom, knowing, and this is an experiment that, that happened around like 1920 ish. Wow. Um, actually 1922, cause last year was the 100th anniversary of it. And knowing that these guys are actually complicated figures. And so, you know, I'm not in my physics classroom to be a polemicist about social issues, even though I have lots of opinions about them and about history. But I had to start my class by saying, so we're going to name a lot of people because you all

need to know the names of these people. And a lot of the stuff we're going to learn is named after them. But I want you to understand that just because I've mentioned someone's name doesn't mean that I am lionizing them. It does not mean that I think that they were a great human being. And some of these people, like, sucked. Like, Schrodinger seemed to be into young girls. Like, there are a lot of things that are just, like, not awesome about these guys. And, you know, Feynman was a notorious sexual harasser. They're all of the – it's a weird thing to carry around all the time

and I mean there's this idea a lot of the time in physics and maybe it's just the popular conception of physics that this is pure science that we shouldn't need to bring social concerns of any type into our discussion of science that this is the realm of science that this is you know this is the realm of math this is stars this is particles and you know people don't matter that much or human structures don't matter that much and and history doesn't matter that much um i think that's clearly not true just because of what we talked about that like scientific discovery is determined by what what is funded and what is

funded is a decision that's made only by people it's not made by the stars and the quarks and the neutrinos saying hey why don't you study me there's a little bit of it that science scientists do get to direct the course of study sometimes but all you need to do is like talk to a couple scientists in america and find out which ones have enough money to do their research and find out which ones feel resource starved. And you'll see that someone is making choices other than the scientists themselves. But it I mean, it goes I'm sure it must go deeper than that. How does it in your view? point, you know, we have multiple studies that show, for example, that scientists who are not white men are underfunded relative to white men, including like relative to our presence in the

field. And this has been shown repeatedly at the National Institutes of Health. And it's kind of amazing to me that it just keeps getting shown and then like nothing happens and then someone else does another study and it's like the same, right? And so I think that the one that's accessible is it's the National Institutes of Health. These people are doing research on questions that potentially have social implications because they're about health. So I think that that one is accessible for people and that people tend to look at physics and say, well, at least we don't have that problem in physics because gravity is doing gravity, right? Like, it's not worried. Why should it matter what, you know, who is doing the research on gravity, right?

Like, ah, it's just gravity. Exactly. I mean, I would love for someone to go and make that case to Congress and say, well, actually, it shouldn't matter if we can, you know, get commercial products or military weapons out of this. What matters here, as to the question of like, for example, history, is that what we do, for example, in cosmology, is we are the cosmic historians. We are writing down the history of the entire fucking universe. Like, that should be enough. Like, That's fucking awesome, but we're doing the whole fucking cosmos. What are you doing? I don't know. Preventing people from getting healthcare? Awesome.

I think that there's that element of it, but it's always the case that the people behind the money have something that they're trying to promote. They have an idea. We have a foundation called the Templeton Foundation. And the Templeton Foundation has a, I don't know if I would say it's religious, but a quasi kind of, they're interested in how did life form and questions that touch on if there's a God, what does that mean physically speaking? And those kinds of things. They have all this money. We need money. That ends up shaping, you know, I'm going to write my grant proposal for some organization according to the guidelines that the organization gives me.

So there's that piece. And where did the Templeton Foundation come from? Like, where did they get the money in the first place? Rich people. I mean, like, I think, you know, the most notable example in the physics community right now in particular is the Simons Foundation. So the Simons Foundation has been giving a lot of money to theoretical physicists in particular. And that money comes from Jim Simons. Jim Simons was a venture capitalist. He just made a fuck ton of money on like Wall Street. And he also before that was a mathematician. He actually has a thing that we use in physics named after him, the turn Simons function. The Simons Foundation wields a lot of power now just because like they have money and they get to decide, actually, we think that this topic is an

interesting topic. This topic's not an interesting topic. And there's no accountability for the fact that Jim Simons gave an interview to the American Institute of Physics archive, where he's like an old white man, where he was like, well, I've given a lot of money. I'm paraphrasing. But he basically said, I've given a lot of money to the Association of Black Physicists. That's not what our organization is called, by the way. And then he basically said, I'm basically a black person, right? No accountability. Okay.

That's rough, Jim. Yes. I mean, awkward, like real awkward, right? But, but, and this person though, because he has a great deal of money is able to sort of chart the course of science in a way, because he's able to pick and choose who gets funding and what questions get researched. I mean, like, look, full disclosure. I, as I was talking, I was doing the calculation, do I really want to say this about the Simons Foundation? Because literally someone emailed me from my university this morning and was like, I think you should apply for this grant that they have going.

And his kids have their own foundation, the Huizing Simons Foundation, which has been doing fantastic work in putting money into women in science. I'm one of the women in science that Huizing Simons has put money into, right? Yeah. So it even shapes what we feel like we can say out loud. There's all this discussion about cancel culture, et cetera, but this is like the OG cancel culture, which is like I will just fuck you up professionally by like completely cutting you off.

If you question, uh, the, the structure that is creating the, you know, putting the pressure on the field and shaping it in ways maybe good, but also maybe bad. And we should have a discussion about those. Well, if you question that too much, then you could just get silently cut off from all of that. Oh, sorry, you didn't get a grant this year. Oh, and you didn't get a grant next year. And your things sort of wither, and so people are incentivized to not talk about those things. And there's no regulation of that, right, when it's foundation money. And as federal funding has declined, there's been increased dependence on this foundation money. Even in the case of federal funding, there's certainly politics that goes on, but there are also rules that the program officers have to follow. And there's a level of regulation that happens there. And so, you know, I think the way that it comes in when federal funding is involved is that Congress gets to decide, actually, you know what, particle physics isn't the darling of the establishment anymore, which is what's been happening is that particle physics funding for it has been in decline. They're much more interested in quantum

information, quantum computing, and the obvious military applications of the results of that research. And so this, what is essentially CIA propaganda, that there's such a thing as basic science that has no politics associated with it, where that is oriented has shifted. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm not just paranoid. There's a whole book about this by, oh, I can't remember Audra's last name. This is really terrible. It's called Freedom's Laboratory. But there's a whole book about this

called Freedom's Laboratory that basically talks about how this was part of the CIA's Cold War propaganda mission was to basically suggest that basic, quote, big air quote, pure basic science that was values free was only something that could happen in the free capitalist world and couldn't happen in the communist world. And they had like science textbooks that were being circulated in like certain Asian countries to kind of push this idea. All of us who are, you know, I'm an older millennial.

We were taught by teachers who came of age in this era where that was the storyline. And so our teachers repeated it to us. I definitely believed it when I was younger. I thought. I was taught that too, that, oh, there's such a thing as pure science that's separate from all those social concerns. It's just sort of happening up in, you know, the platonic realm of math and numbers and physics. I chose physics partly because as a 10-year-old, this is when I decided I wanted to do it. I think my parents are both political activists, and physics seemed like something that was above the fuck shit of the world,

and I wanted something that was beautiful. And so the book is Freedom's Laboratory by Audra Wolf. It just came to me. But we've basically been fed CIA propaganda. Wow. Okay, I've got to keep asking you about this, but we have to take one more break before we wrap up. So we'll be right back with more on this fascinating topic

from Chanda Prescott-Weinstein. Okay, we're back with Chanda Prescott-Weinstein. So I want to talk more for you. As a practicing physicist, cosmologist, however, one of the many titles you might give yourself, how politics, activism, and, you know, race play a part in, in your work. I mean, you, you say in your, in the description of your book that you're the first black woman to have the exact role that you

do in the sciences. And, you know, we were just talking about the idea of pure science that we grew up with. I imagine that now you're on the inside of it. The idea of there being such a thing as pure science doesn't seem like as realistic. So how does it look to you from the inside as someone who does look at it through that lens? You know, maybe I'll go back to the title of my book, which is The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey Into Dark Matter, Space-Time, and Dreams Deferred. And I really wanted that Langston Hughes reference to Montage of a Dream Deferred in that title, because I think in a lot of ways, the book is a narrative about understanding that this idea of physics as being disconnected from

values, as being above and outside of the social world, is an almost childlike idea that we have to let go of if we want to move forward in a world where every child gets the equal opportunity and has access to their right to a dark night sky. To have the experience of sitting and wondering under a night sky and asking questions about, is that all that there is? Where is the dark matter supposed to be in this picture? Or whatever other weird thoughts that they might have, right? But it's harder to have that experience if you're in an urban area where there's significant amounts of light pollution and you don't have access to a dark night sky because there's no public transit there, because you use a mobility

device that is hard to get out into the desert because your local, you know, public parks don't have mobility devices that are designed for rough land, which luckily that's becoming increasingly common, but it's not everywhere, right? But also if you're hungry, if you're not getting the right kind of water, if you're dealing with lead poisoning, all of these other things, they're distracting you. You're not having that moment that our ancestors, that was the norm for our ancestors. Every fucking night was like that until like fairly recently, right? And so thinking about what it means to connect with the humanity that is part of how we evolved, right? Asking those

questions, I think it then becomes very clear that this work that we do is both of, in my opinion, cosmic significance because we are a storytelling species. We like to tell stories about the night sky. And in order to make it possible for people to engage with that side of themselves, there are a whole series of social issues. Like I just touched on disability justice, public transportation, light pollution, you know, clean water in Jackson, Mississippi, all of that, all of those things come together. And how does it change science depending on who gets to do the science, right? Like if those kids who are, you know, in that urban area or are struggling with those disabilities, et cetera. If, you know, we,

we are able to change things so that they have that access, uh, that, that you did. And that, you know, folks like my sister did, for example, and are able to enter that world. Like, how does that change science for the better if we're able to do that? Cause you know, again, a, a, uh, uh, you know, that old way of thinking that the, the propaganda is propaganda that we were brought up with would say, well, who does it matter who's doing the science? Because it's pure science and like the scientific method works no matter what, who's, who's doing it. What, what's the, what is the case against that way of thinking? You know, I think like the first thing I would say is like, why the fuck does it matter if it makes science better? I think the question is, does it make us better? science better? I think the question is, does it make us better? That's actually my primary concern.

I mean, I can actually answer the question of why does it make science better? But like, I have a fundamental like question about like, whether that's the thing that we should be concerned about? Or should we be concerned about making sure that everybody is treated like a whole like five fifths of a human being? Right, right? And in the scenario where we are doing that, that means that some people are going to think about the way that they engage with the world around them through this mathematical framework that I have been able to learn and study and work on professionally. I do think that there are ways that we can think about how people being marginalized and feeling pushed out and deciding, like, actually, I was treated so badly when I was doing research that I don't want to do research anymore and leaving the field, that that means that those people are no longer there to advocate, for example, for their dissertation work. So this is a little bit of like academic in the weed stuff. But when you write a PhD, you are the world's expert on the thing you wrote the PhD on. And you're the person who goes and gives talks about that and communicates to people about it and advocates for the ideas in your dissertation and the results in your dissertation. If you leave the field,

like you decide you're not going to work in academia anymore, nobody's advocating for your ideas anymore, that is naturally going to shape the direction that scientific conversations go in because you're not in the room. So what does this have to do with race and gender and sexuality and disability? Well, queer people, black women, black enbies, disabled people are more likely to feel like there's no room for them in the community. And so they're more likely to walk away. And so those are the ideas that we lose. Do I think that they would have had different ideas from white men? No, I don't necessarily subscribe to that essentialist idea. I mean, I genuinely believe race is a social construct and not biological. I don't think that there's anything in our biology that's like,

here, you think about gravity this way and you think about gravity that way. But it is a loss to the field because there are people who had thoughts and ideas that maybe we needed who are no longer there to advocate for them. So I do think it is a loss to the field. But the bigger question is like, what about letting people be human? And this is part of what humans do. That's like really clear. We come up with stories about the universe. It's part of what we do. Like we bullshit about the universe. We've been doing it for like millennia, right? So like, why not let everyone participate? I really love to have a devil's advocate argument, just roundhouse kicked like that.

Like, you know, I was like, well, how would you, you know, how would you argue against this, which someone might say, and you just completely demolished it? Because, of course, you're right that, you know, the fundamental, you put it so beautifully that, like, your experience with the mathematics and with the science has been personally enriching and important to you, and it's a beautiful thing that everybody should be able to partake in and experience if they want to. In the same way, music or comedy, which is what I do, comedy has been very important to me, and I hate the idea that anybody who's doing comedy would find themselves pushed out of it because that sucks for them as a human. You know, I want other people to be able to partake in the same beautiful thing that I love so much. But then there's also the number two argument that you can make. You know, we, people, you, people use something similar about comedy. Funny is funny. Who cares? You know, it's just funny is funny. Who matters who tells the joke? I've personally been in comedy writing rooms where I'm like, my God, we got to tell a funny story. We got to tell a bit of history. We got to make a joke

about something never would have happened if somebody else, if, if these folks hadn't been in the room, right. That, um, uh, and, uh, even if you, I love the way that you put it, that it's a loss to the field if people are pushed out of it. Because say someone subscribes to like the genius theory of, you know, science, which I don't, that, hey, one out of every two billion people is like a super genius. Well, you're reducing your chances of finding the super geniuses who are going to move the field forward. Exactly.

You know, some large percentage of folks are pushed out. And with people like, say, a Richard Feynman, right, who was so celebrated over the course of his life and after his death as, you know, you know, oh, it's a kid from humble beginnings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, that whole story. who could have that story, who could bring, you know, a spark to you, and also might not, like, serially, sexually harass and assault people over the course of many decades. That's a related thing about him. But yeah, like, why would we want to cut ourselves off from the human potential in the field? It's madness to do so. Yeah, you know, it's funny because like, I didn't always think like this about it. I think I thought in a very kind of like mainstream way about, you know, and actually the very first piece of writing that I did about this topic was because my PhD advisor, I mentioned earlier, Lee Smolin wrote this book, The Trouble with Physics, that was basically about how string theory was too dominant in quantum gravity

discussions. And he was basically saying that homogeneity was actually really bad for the field because people weren't exchanging ideas about bigger questions and other frameworks. And Sean Carroll wrote a blog about this and was kind of responding to it. And I was just sitting there looking at this all incredulously. I think it was 2007. And I was like, this is a bunch of white men arguing about diversity. And they're just arguing about diversity. It hasn't come up at all that there are very few women participating in this conversation. There are no people of color, not women of color, not men of color, et cetera.

And so I wrote a long comment on his blog. And I was like, hey, by the way, you're using that word diversity in a very limited way, which is really ironic given the terms of the conversation about conversations being too limited. And Sean actually quite generously was like, hey, this is a really good point. Do you want to turn this into a blog entry? And that was the first time anybody ever asked me to write ever, really. And that was the argument that I made. But I think as I've gotten older and grayer and wiser, I've started and engaged more with thinking about how do I situate this in the context of history? The United States and other places has already a very nasty history with articulating black people as a source of labor and that that's the value that we bring to the table is the intellectual ideas it just used

to be that historically it was like so what's your capacity at growing rice and managing a plantation that that was the intellectual building on black people's intellectual capacity and labor and thought and physical labor. And so I want people to question, do we have to stay in this mode of constantly trying to turn people into producers? Because what world has that given us? The world that we're in is an extreme crisis in a lot of ways. People are having a hard time making a living. Poor white people, poor black people, poor people of all kinds are having a hard time making a living. So maybe we actually want to question these logics that we're allowing to dominate our science. And we also want to make

sure that we, first of all, we want to eliminate poverty. We can do that. That's a thing. And I think part of eliminating poverty is allowing people to have those moments of connection with the universe, to be their full human selves. And I think racism and classism and transphobia and all of those social structures, they can be changed and should be changed because it allows us to have that relationship with the universe. And I think that that by itself is worth it. Just like making people laugh, like that is inherently a valuable act.

Oh, my God. What a beautiful sentiment to end us on, because you're right. The framework that I was using to talk about science was like, yeah, well, we want to advance the field. We want to we want to be more productive. We want to get better science more quickly. Why would we want to cut people off from it? But it's true. That's me internalizing some of the logic of capitalism, of saying that we always want to increase that productivity what can we get out of it and what you're reminding me is that like the reason i love science i love thinking about science and talking about science even though i don't i come from a family of scientists i don't do it myself but is you know the beautiful thing about science is you know you're lying on a hillside staring up and going like what the fuck is this shit you know exactly trying to answer the question and it's a beautiful, you know, my, my big sort of spiritual connection from science came, came from like studying evolution, not even in college, but you know, in my, in my spare, in my spare time in college,

just reading, you know, Darwin and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins before he went nuts and stuff like that. You know, and, you know, just engaging with, oh my God, like it just physical processes, you know, create the endless forms, most beautiful that Darwin wrote about. What an incredible mystery that I was like immersing myself in. And that's the real shit, right?

And we're the only things on the world that are doing that, right? We're the only objects in the world that are doing that right we're the only we're the only we're the only objects in the universe that we know about that are trying to tell that story and that's a fund that's not important because you can build a bomb or because you might be able to publish that's like a fundamentally important good in the universe for the universe and for ourselves and so we should be creating a world in which everybody gets to do that. Cause that's a fundamental, that's, that's why humans are fucking here. Right. And we are part

of the universe, right? We are, I think it was maybe Carl Sagan who talked about us being like a self-aware part of the cosmos. That's, that's, that's trying to understand the rest of the cosmos. So, you know, one of the things that I always like to remind people is that we are literally a reflection of the cosmos. We are, and we are, we are genuinely star stuff. That part is true.

Oh my God. And we should treat each other as such. Shouldn't we? We should remember that when, when we look at each other and when we interact with each other. What, what a wonderful conversation. All time great podcast episode. We're going to end it there on that perfect note. Chanda, thank you so much.

Please tell us the name of the book once again, because I'm sure everyone's going to want to go grab a copy of it after this wonderful conversation. It's The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey Into Dark Matter, Space Time, and Dreams Deferred. And you can get it in all formats from pretty much any bookstore, though I highly recommend an indie. Thank you so much for being here, Chanda. Can't thank you enough. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you once again to Chanda for coming on the show. If you want to pick up her book, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com

slash books, and when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. Once again, I'm going to read out all your names this week. Let's do it. I want to thank

A, Akira White, Alexey Batalov, Alan Liska, Anne Slagle, Antonio LB, Ashley, Benjamin Birdsall, Benjamin Cornelius Bates, Benjamin Rice, Beth Brevik, Black Cat Jackster, Brighton, Camu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chase Thompson Boe, Chris McKinless, Chris Mullins, Chris Staley, Clifton Vargas, Comrade Crunchy,

Courtney Henderson, Daniel Halsey, David Condry, David Conover, Devin Kim, Deanne McCullough, DPC is awesome, Drill Bill, Duck Moo, Dude With Games, Eben Lowe, Ellie Mary, Ethan Jennings, George Rohack, Harmonic, Deanne McCullough, DPC is awesome, Drill Bill, Duck Mood, Dude With Games, Eben Lowe, Ellie Mary, Ethan Jennings, George Rohack,

Harmonic, J. Scott Christensen, Jason Burbage, J. Sal, Jeff Nash, Jim Myers, Jim Shelton, Joanna Lingenfelter,

Joker on the Sofa, John McPeak, Caitlin Dennis, Caitlin Flanagan, Kel Crow, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, gotta go to page two,

here we go, Kevin France, Kev Lara, Lacey Tiganoff, Lacey Garrison, Lara Willing, Larry Latouf, Larry Studer-Studenmund, Lauren Vivian, Lisa Matoulis, Lauren Fieldhouse, Maggie Hardaway, Manuel Garcia, Marhi, Martin J. Lawler, Martin Tithonium, Marvin Weichert, Matt, Miles Gillings, Rudman, Named Gwen, Mrs. King Coke, Neil Gampa, Nicholas Nicholas, Morris,

Nikki Battelli, Noah Dowd, Nuyagik Ippoluk, Opal, Paul Malk, Paul Schmidt, Peter Zeglin, Philip Hanwalt, Rachel Nieto, Richard Watkins, Rick Spurgeon, Robin Madison, Ronald C. Waits, Rosamund Sturgis, Rosie Gutierrez, Roy Ziegler, Ryan Shelby, Samantha Schultz, Sam Ogden, Sean Smith, Scooper, Super Duper, Spencer Campbell, Susan E. Fisher, Sfosky, Thomas Lewis, Tim S. Root, time for page three, Timothy Kearns, Vincente Lopez, Vornack, Weeb Milk, and WhiskeyNerd88, and do not forget Zach Zim. Thank you so much, everybody. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover and just five bucks a month gets you access to all of our goodies. If you want to see me live, head to adamconover.net

and buy some tickets. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week on Factually.