Factually! with Adam Conover - The Edge of Space Time with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

When the world gets to be too much, contemplating the endless wonder and beauty of the cosmos can be a huge relief. After all, we’re insignificant in the grand scale of space and time. But cosmic thinking can also teach us so much about ourselves. This week, Adam sits with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, professor of physics and faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, to talk about the truths we uncover about ourselves when we search for the truths of the universe. Find Chanda’s new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. I am thrilled to have you with me on the show again this week. And, you know, we talk on this show. But what's happening in the world, I talk to experts, to scholars, I talk to journalists, people like that. And you know what?

A lot of them are pretty depressing. We end up discussing, you know, the failures of humanity, our inability to cooperate, to care for each other, to improve the world around us, or to, you know, solve any of our longstanding social problems in a durable way that doesn't result in a media backsliding 50 to 70 years later, you know, a lot of bad shit. So often humanity fails to do good things. But, you know, to say the obvious, there are still many good things about humanity. And one of them is our endless quest to understand the universe around us. You know, we do in fact live in an unfeeling chaotic void,

but we can also look into that void and say, what the fuck is this void? What's going on with all that shit? I mean, hydrogen atoms don't sit in the sun and ask, what is happening to me? But we do, and that is something that is special about humanity. And that is what we are going to be talking about this week. Whenever I'm feeling bad about the world around me,

I like to take a look at us on that cosmic scale, you know? We're infinitesimally small. our problems don't matter that much in the scheme of space time. But by delving into space time, if we do it right, well, it might do more than just distract us. It might help us actually reflect back on our day to day and give us a new way to look, not just at the universe around us, but at our own society. So that is what we are going to do today.

We're going to take a break from politics. And we are going to think about the nature of space, time, and your place in the cosmos. and then we are going to talk about how thinking that way helps us reflect back on politics, back on society, and how these things are in dialogue with each other. We have an absolutely incredible guest on the show this week to help us dive into the substructures of reality and of human society itself. And before we get to her, I want to remind you if you want to support this show and all the amazing conversations we bring you every single week.

Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of. the show ad-free. We got a lot of other community features as well. We would love to have you. And of course, if you want to come see me on the road, you can get all my tour dates at Adamconover.net. That is where they are always hanging out. And now, let's get to this week's guest. She is a returning guest on the show. Her name is Chonda Prescott Weinstein, and she's a professor of physics and a faculty member in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also simply one of the very best science communicators working today.

And she has a new book out called The Edge of Space Time, Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. She does a better job than almost anyone of synthesizing physics and social studies and literature and the arts and helping us think on that big cosmic scale. I know you're going to love this interview. Let's get to it with Chonda Prescott Weinstein. Chonda, thank you so much for being on the show again. Thank you so much for having me. You're one of my favorite guests that we had a number of years ago. You have a new book out called The Edge of Space Time Particles Poetry and the Cosmic Boogie.

Look, the world really sucks right now. Oh, thank you for holding it up. We'll get a copy in the studio soon, I hope. The world is in bad shape, right? There's a lot of things to worry about. We talk about a lot of them on the show. Why should people care about cosmology or about, you know, the universe or space time or such big topics when there's so much shit on Earth to worry about?

So one of the arguments that I make in the edge of space time is that spending time in physics can be a politically important experience. And so actually, instead of saying you should think about the cosmos as a way of escaping from our political moment, part of what I'm arguing is that you should think about the cosmos because it's part of how we prepare ourselves to move through our political moment. If only because so much of what's happening right now involves big systemic structural issues where we need to use our critical thinking faculties, where we need to understand abstract rhetoric that's being used on us and against us. And physics is a great playground for thinking about the ways in which rhetoric works and

abstract ideas. And the universe is also really weird. So when people are telling you, oh, this thing is normal, we have to enforce normalcy. The universe doesn't know normalcy. Well, you're already putting me on blast because, my intro, I literally did talk about, hey, we're going to talk about space time and cosmology as a way of escaping all the political episodes we've been doing lately. So thank you for immediately contradicting me. I'm still going to record the intro that way anyway, because I have it all written down.

But can you have an example of what you're talking about, about a point in comparison there? So I think my current favorite example is the subatomic particle, the neutrino. So neutrinos are very mysterious particles in the sense that we know they have a little bit of mass, but not very much mass. They move very quickly. And they don't really interact with other types of matter very readily. So they're kind of like loners. They're like introverts. They're like, we don't talk to you. We just go right through you. They are emitted by bananas. So that's kind of strange. And other things I assume it's not just bananas, right? They're not a banana exclusive. bananas. But bananas, you know, bananas have a lot of potassium in them. That's one of the reasons

we like eating bananas. And occasionally, one of the potassium atoms will go through a weak nuclear reaction and a neutrino will fly out of it. And it's totally safe, right? Like bananas are totally safe. I don't want anyone to panic. But the other thing about neutrinos is that there are three types. So there's an electron neutrino, a Miwan neutrino and a tau neutrino. You don't need to remember the three names. You just need to remember that there are three flavors. That's what they're called. They don't have a taste, but they're called three flavors. And neutrinos are non-trinary. So as they move through space time, they will just randomly oscillate between types. Wow. Right? They'll just like, it'll become an electron neutrino will become a tau neutrino or

whatever. Yeah. And so the way that we actually first really stumbled into this problem is that we knew the nuclear processes that make the sun shine and really make the sun go. should produce a lot of electron neutrinos. Just from the nuclear theory of how those phenomena work, when scientists went out to measure, okay, we should be seeing a bunch of electron neutrinos, they weren't seeing the same number of electron neutrinos that they would expect to see.

And it turns out that the reason they weren't seeing them is because as they were leaving the sun, they were just like randomly turning into a different kind of neutrino. You were like, fuck it, I'm a muon neutrino now. And how do we ever observe the moment of transformation or? This is a really, I mean, observing even one neutrino is actually really hard. So for example, there's an old, very deep mine in Japan where they built this like giant water tank where they had to like the water is a very specifically carefully cleaned water. and the hope is basically that occasionally a neutrino will fly through that and go through the right interactions that will see evidence that there was a neutrino there.

But you're talking about like a huge giant like a thousand feet underground effort to just like detect a few neutrinos. So this is like a very hard to even know that a neutrino was physically there is a very difficult thing. But to connect it back to the political question. Please. We have these people walking around being like, well, being non-binary is and it's completely unnatural. And neutrinos are like, fuck you guys. We're just like, neutrinos are not only non-trinary, right? They're oscillating between their three flavors, but particles can also be waves.

So they're already non-binary. Like I just like, these people say, like trying to tell us what's natural. Like they don't know what they're talking about. This is like hardwired into how the universe works. Well, okay. So the first time you said non-trinary, I was like this seems like a very serious physics word. But you're actually drawing a comparison between that and non-binary gender identities. Or is non-trinary like the technical term?

No, well, I guess this is an interesting question because I'm the one who came up with non-trinary as a way of describing it. But I think it's technically, it's technically accurate. And it's probably because I'm queer and a gender that like that seemed like a natural terminology for me. And so I think that that's another example of how, you know, science is a social phenomenon. What we know about the universe is stuff that we learn as people in community interacting with our political and our social moment. And the fact that I got kind of obsessed with this aspect of neutrinos has a lot to do with the fact that I was very committed to like looking at the world through the lens of queer theory and seeing, you know, what the universe had to offer. And it offered me non-trieneering neutrinos, which is awesome. Well, that's a really interesting nest of issues you brought up because, yeah, you know, people who want to limit who we can be or who other people can be in society tend to be very rigid, you know, people come as male and female and you can't change.

And, you know, they have this very like setting stone idea of what people can be, which, you know, where do they think that comes from, maybe from some old book or maybe they're just like, that's how, like, that's how. That's what I was told when I was a kid. And that's what it's got to be. They've got some rigidity about it. And the universe does not obey that rigidity. In fact, the universe, like, the more you learn about physics, the more you encounter things that the human mind seems almost unable to comprehend without great difficulty. Like, just the basics of quantum mechanics would have been around for 100 years.

People, you know, like the average person you explain to them and they're like, that doesn't sound like any noun I've ever heard of, like the way that this behaves. Like when you say that something can be a particle in a wave, it like, that's a very basic one. And we're already sort of boggling, you know, our human categories in this deep way. But then it's interesting that you also say that science is a social phenomenon because then it sort of works. It feels like the weirdness is going the other way. Because, you know, what I hear about, okay, a particle is a wave, et cetera. I'm like, all right, I am learning something concrete about the universe that's bigger and more fixed than anything in my mind, right?

Like, oh, I'm just a tiny, you know, spec with a meat computer walking around, right? That is, you know, designed to be able to identify fruits and prey and predators and not, you know, the subatomic structure of the universe. And so, of course, it doesn't fit into these categories. and it's going to be a struggle for any limited apes such as myself to understand. But then at the same time, you're saying, well, hold on, no, science itself is a social phenomenon, which I would have thought it was something bigger. So what do you mean when you say that? You know, when I talk about, so when we use the word science, right, sometimes we're talking about the body of knowledge that we understand as scientific knowledge,

but also sometimes we're talking about the processes in the community. And when we're talking about like the work of doing science, that's work. that's done by people and it's done in a very political environment. I think if people weren't aware of that before the last inauguration, post-inagoration, people are very aware that science happens in a policy-driven and policy-shaped environment. Yeah, I mean, well, the current policy is that science doesn't happen at all. Their policy is like, no, we don't do that anymore as a country. Right.

And I will say, you know, I wrote the edge of space time with a feeling of urban. around this because even before the last presidential election, I was seeing the writing on the wall with astrophysics funding and with particle physics theory funding and with cosmology funding. And I was seeing that we were in trouble. I was doing a lot of national policy work. I was actually on the committee that's considered like the top advisory committee for the executive branch in the federal government on particle physics policy before Donald Trump fired me during Yom Kippur. So I like literally came out of prayers and like opened my phone, checked my email. And there was this email that was like, thank you for your service. It didn't

actually say we were fired, but we were fired. And I was doing all of this work and I was sitting in these, I was the youngest person in these rooms usually. And I'm already in my 40s. So that's not particularly young. And I was with a different generation of physicists that had a different mindset and relationship to how funding happens, they're used to being like, well, we're the physicist. You're going to give us money, right? And people being like, yeah, we understand why physics is culturally important. And I was already seeing we were not in that environment anymore. And so I did want to write this book where I also wanted to make the case to people that you want to live in a democracy and a healthy democracy includes people who are the keepers of coffee.

cosmic stories. And so I think this is where science is a social phenomenon comes in, which is that if I know the story about cosmology and I get to continue my work, that means I get to pass it on to another generation. And there will be another generation of scientists who shares those stories with the rest of the community. We're an apprenticeship structure in professional science, which means that there is someone who knows the story, someone who's a griot, basically, a West African storyteller. and passes those stories on to the next generation. And when you break that, which is what's been happening over the last years, the funding's

been cut for us to train apprentices, you end up in a situation where you have a lost generation of people who don't have the knowledge to pass it on. And I think that's really damaging for us as a global community. Like when I say democracy, I don't mean it in a nationalist sense. I just really mean, like, this is part of being in society. We are a storytelling species, as Sylvia Winter has said. And this is one of the stories that's become spiritually and psychosocially important to us. Yeah, I mean, I grew up, you know, hearing, I grew up in a scientific family.

I had a lot of science education, but we're sort of taught about science as a, you know, endless progress of the human mind and knowledge of something that we amass. But we're not really taught about the fact that, like, knowledge. is also something that we store as a society that we're like the repositories of it and the communicators of it. And like if we die with it in our heads and we haven't passed it along to enough people, like the knowledge dies. Right.

It's, uh, and, and so we can like lose it, you know, and it is, it is something that like, you raise a good point that it, it, it truly only exists socially. It is about the world outside of us, but it's, it's, it's, existence is written down. It's in people's heads. It's in the conversation that we're currently having, right, in this recording. And it needs to be passed along. It also strikes me that you said that you were used to, you know, the physicists were used to, oh, we get the money because we're the physicists because physics is culturally important. Well, in American history, that's also because physics was used to build weaponries and energy, right? Energy technology,

which it is not quite as much anymore as it used to be, right? Nuclear weaponry is like maybe not quite so in vogue as something that we're trying to develop new weapons of. We're trying to maintain this type while we have. But other fields of inquiry that are not so useful to the state or to capitalism have traditionally had less support, right? Yeah. So I think, you know, particle physics has sat at a, an interesting kind of policy intersection for this reason, because in a lot of ways, the discipline is an outgrowth of that time period of the Manhattan Project. A lot of the scientists who

worked on the Manhattan Project went on to do a lot of work in theoretical physics that focused on particle physics and early universe cosmology. And in a way, they kind of had legacy support from the government, because the government was like, well, these guys give us useful things. So we'll keep funding them. Occasionally some of them come and do work for us over the summer. So I highly recommend people read about DARPA and Think Biner's book about the Jasons is really illuminating. They're like this very select group of scientists, mostly physicists, who were brought together to think about big questions on behalf of the government, like very secretive. And so particle physics, I think for a long time benefited from the legacy of good faith from the Manhattan.

Project, good faith from the government, not so much good faith from like the victims of the Manhattan Project, which were many internationally, right? And over the last like 30 years, that has changed and other areas of physics have become more important from a commercial perspective. Like I'm thinking about condensed matter or materials, science, you know, developing the kinds of technologies that put, for example, an iPhone in somebody's hands, like making transistors small enough and that kind of thing. And so the other thing that I wanted to say with the edge of space time is like, let's make an argument for what we do that steps away from we make you weapons and steps away from we are good

PR for training young people who will then be diverted into making weapons. And I want to say that this is important to us in a very, I mean, one of the lines I have in the introduction is the universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism. And one of the ways you can appreciate that is actually by looking at the cosmos and looking at the wonder and like, how do you contain non-trinary neutrinos and wave particle duality in fucking capitalism? Like, there has to be something, the capitalism can't be the determinant of our relationship with the universe. And so on a level, I'm saying, don't let the military industrial complex define what science. is for you. And I really wanted to make an argument from that direction, not just to my audience, but also to fellow scientists that when we're making the case for why what we do is important,

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I don't care about the rest of it. But it is, it is mediated by society. But in a way that once we know that. that we can start, I don't know, using it in a more productive way, you know, like it limits you if you don't recognize the fact that it is limited to some extent, right, that society is a limiting factor. If you don't recognize that, you're even more limited than you would be otherwise. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that I've had kind of a frustration with in terms of how scientists approach the policy element, which is we're very dependent on the general public

for getting our work done because that's where most of the funding in our field. comes from is from the government. And that comes down to eventually that's people's taxes, right? Or, yeah, I guess it's really just people's taxes or, you know, whatever people are paying because, like, Donald Trump has decided to tax everything that comes in, right? And we often take the attitude as a professional community. I guess I don't want to say we because this is not the way that I think about it. but my community takes the attitude that all we have to do is go and lobby Congress.

Whenever the president has a budget that we don't like, we just go lobby our members of Congress and they will fix it for us. Part of what I don't like about that is it gets away from the democratic investment of having people on the ground at the grassroots level, understanding why this matters to them and being personal advocates for it. So there's an element of this also of me wanting to say to scientists, let's take our argument to the people for why our work matters to them. And not as a matter of checking off a box for like the NSF broader impacts criterion of like you have to do something that connects with society,

but actually recognize that we are part of society. And the other thing is the subtitle of the book is Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. For years we've been watching as these horrific cuts happen to the arts and the humanities. And far too often scientists have said, basically, that's unfortunate and it's really too bad those people don't do something that's practical. Which, like, I realize, like, talking to you as an entertainer, that sounds wild, right? Because, like, the entertainment industry brings in so much money. It's such a huge economy. But part of the argument I wanted to make is what we do is like poetry.

We are curious about the universe and this very abstract, great. grassroots way that's not about making things. It is literally just about making sense of the universe and the world according to a set of rules that give us insight in a particular way. And that's poetry. It's, we choose maybe a different set of rules and say like Shakespeare did with iambic pentameter, but nonetheless, an equation is a sentence. So what if instead of looking at the poets and being like, well, it sucks to be y'all, what if we were in solidarity with the poets and recognize that this is a fight for the human mind and human intellect that we are all in together. That's really beautiful because both poets and scientists are engaged in the

cultural process of meaning making, right? Of looking outside and saying, hey, why the fuck are we doing all this? What does it mean? What is the larger picture in the universe, right? What can we take home. When I was a kid, I had this, I can't remember the name of this book, but it was stuck with me. And I also think the book is like semi-stupid, but it was a children's book. And it was about the role of the artist in society.

It was about a bunch of mice that are all working. Maybe you'll be familiar with this. It's a bunch of mice and they're all doing jobs. You know, some of the mice are gathering food or whatever. One of the mice is just sitting out in the sunshine, right? And they're like, what are you doing, lazy mouse? He's like, I'm collecting colors. They're like, what are you talking about?

And then the wintertime, they all go inside because it's all cold and they all eat the stored up food. And then the mouse that was being lazy, you know, sort of displays the colors to the other mice via poetry and song and art or whatever. And so this, I think this book's probably from the 70s, you know, a little bit of a late hippie period role of, hey, don't be, don't call the artist lazy because later you'll be, you'll want what they have.

right? But I also, it also did stick with me as, as a kid. And the scientist is also kind of doing the same thing, right? Is, is like, sure, learning about the world for practical reasons, but also just because it helps us, you know, make sense of what the fuck we're doing here, right? That's a really wonderful point of comparison. I almost never hear made. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we could talk about Project Hail Mary. which has been very popular. And there were things I loved, I've never read the book. There were things I loved about the film. I'm an American cinematographer subscribing cinematography nerd.

So I just, like, loved seeing it on the big screen. It was gorgeously shot. It was, like, really incredibly beautiful. Stunningly shot. I actually just came home to my copy of American cinematographer that has that on the cover. So I'm really looking forward to reading that cover story. But part of what made the movie work is there was a whole team of NASA scientists that science advised on the film. So when people are kind of asking this question of like, what does this have to do with my everyday life?

There is so much of like the television that they watch, the films that they watch that actually is using this knowledge, this body of knowledge that we have been able to craft and pull together about how the universe works. that becomes a springboard for people's imaginations. There's a lot of stuff in the film that doesn't make sense scientifically. And actually, I was, like, so annoyed at a video that Andy Weir posted where he was trying to explain some idea he had. And he tried to explain how neutrinos actually are in the video and was so wrong that I actually posted a corrective. I have no problem with people making science up.

I'm just like when you start with the things that we do know and how they actually work, at least get that part right, or let a real scientist describe it. But the beautiful thing about all of that kind of science fiction and fantasy writing, SFF, is that we are providing a springboard with what is known about science

to give people a place to play around and be imaginative. And that happens partly because, for example, some of the images that they used in the film were based on NASA images and all of NASA's space telescope images are public domain. That means like if you're an artist and you're watching or listening to this right now and you want to do something with some NASA material, you can for free. All you have to do is credit. NASA has a credit line that you have to use when you're captioning your work.

That is an incredible gift to global society that these images are freely available for inspiration. And so look, I'm sitting here in my Lieutenant O'Hura dress from Star Trek, the original series. Oh, yeah. Hold on a second. You are, you do look like O'Hura. I just, I just clocked that.

You've been sitting here the whole time. I've been talking to Lieutenant O'Hara. I didn't even realize it. Right. And I'm actually, so I'm not quite, I'm wearing like a bigger version of the earrings that she has in the series. I almost wore the smaller ones, but someone I'm just gifted these earrings. to me. And I was like, I'm going to wear them.

They're gorgeous. But you know, thank you. I will pass that on. The thing about Star Trek is that Star Trek, the next generation, you can actually watch the series and see the difference between the visuals before the Hubble Space Telescope turns on and after the Hubble Space

Telescope turns on. In the original series. In the next generation. Ah, between the two series. Yeah. Yeah. So like, so that like basically in the 80s and the 90s, you can basically see the way that television changed, commercials changed, like, I mean, you drive

through San Francisco and you always have these like Silicon Valley types that are like, our new amazing universe altering technology that's actually going to ruin workers' lives. And they're often using cosmic imagery because they understand that this holds critical

social power, right? And so I really think people may be underappreciation. how much this is already part of their lives. Yeah. You also make me think of like the incredible social power, like the first images of Earth, the blue marble images had in, when would that have been?

The 70s? I'm guessing. When did those come out? I think they would have seen like 60s and 70s, late 60s. That was when we first had like photographs of the Earth from space, which is a scientific image, as you say. but it's also such a powerful social image that like reshaped, you know, art, reshaped,

uh, American society in many ways. We like literally didn't really have that image in our heads until we saw it scientifically. And so the, the, the scientific is the cultural. Um, what a wonderful point. Uh, well, let's, let's, uh, let's talk about some, let's stop talking about, science as culture and let's start talking about the thing itself, you know. I really want to get into some of what you talk about in the book. Like, imagine we're, you know, we're getting high as, as freshmen in a dorm room and you're taking, you know, your physics class, right? What are you

blowing our minds with that's in the book? Like, what is the, what is the stuff that, you know, just as a starting point when you're thinking about the wonder of the universe? Where do you like to start? Okay. So here's what I love about this question, which I hated from. physics. And so one of the challenges that I gave myself with this book is I was like, okay, I need to talk about some of these ideas. But if I'm bored, my audience is going to be bored. And so I have to figure out how I'm going to make like classical Newtonian physics interesting for myself. That was actually one of the projects of the book was that I need to go back and revise my relationship with this part of physics. And I think the thing that I came to that I

wish like any of my professors had said is that motion is fucking weird. Like the fact that motion happens at all. If we start with general relativity as our big picture, so Einstein's theory of relativity governs gravity as far as we understand it, you can set up a space time in Einstein's relativity where nothing happens, like where it's completely empty and you just have like a universe. But the moment you endow the universe with some quantum properties like the ones that our universe seems to have, then motion becomes an evident. And because when you have quantum properties, the universe, even in empty space time, has little bits of energy flickering in and out.

And some of those flickerings will become particles that stick around. And when those particles stick around, eventually they're gravitationally attracted to each other. They create gases and clouds and those clouds condense into stars. And then you get some quantum tunneling and those stars start to feel. fuse, so you don't just have like a dead thing like Saturn, but you actually have something that is fusing and producing lots of light. And over some amount of time, like a few billion years, that will maybe Nova. And in the meantime, it's created like helium, oxygen, carbon. All of these things just happen because you have doubt, endowed the universe with these things. So, okay,

Coming back to what we're talking about Frash Year, my ideal scenario is that that's how you start your first mechanics class, which is just the science of motion from a Newtonian perspective, which is that you say, sure, we're not doing any quantum. We're not doing any relativity. But we're going to talk about the end point of all of that, which is that in everyday life, because all of that happened, this ball rolls down an incline in this particular way. And that's odd. That's fucking odd. It's also awesome, but it's odd. That is really, that is really weird. And it, it, oh, you reminded me how I've always felt that we've taught science backwards, um, in America.

Because I remember taking, it's a different field of science, but I remember taking AP bio in high school. And it was the, it was the worst fucking class because you're doing like organic chemistry. It was like, the test was like, like, the test was like, like, you were. like right down the Krebs cycle and it was like carbon and oxygen turns into potassium. You know, I was like, it's like doing algebra with shit that's not numbers. Like I was like, I don't know what any of this is. This sucks, right? And then when I was in college, went to a liberal arts school, I don't know why.

I just started reading, you know, some more popular science about biology. You know, I read Richard Dawkins, a selfish gene, R.A.P. to Richard Dawkins. but you know that's a that was a wonderful book I thought I read on the Beacon's Gene was maybe more self-referential than we thought but anyway it was a very mind-expanding book and he that was in the 70s before a lot of things happened with him right I read a book called the Beak of the Finch by a writer I think named Joshua Weiner I think um but these these are books that sort of told the story of evolution and rather than you know, here's the chemistry of like how the thing works, which is so, you're so zoomed in.

You're like, what does this mean? But instead made me go like, hold on a second. From very basic building blocks, you get this like infinite complexity of life, right? Like that's, once you actually are holding that in mind, it becomes like something you can just like lie in bed and think about for hours and sort of allow your mind to be boggled by. I was like, why was that not the thing that was told to me? Why was I not taught the version that has mystery and awe in it? And then you get to the specificity.

Because the specificity like comes at the end of all of that, as you just said, right? I think there's so much in science pedagogy and science education that focuses on the student's problem solving skills. And sometimes what gets lost in the mix is like what brought that student to the classroom in the first place, particularly for those of us who are majoring in physics, it's. probably because, like, they saw a brief history of time, the Errol Morris documentary, which is like how I came to theoretical physics. And then I read a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking. And I was like, I want to do black holes and particle physics. And then you get to frash mechanics. And it's like, and here is a ball rolling down an incline, draw the force diagram. You have to include friction. You have to include gravity. What's the initial velocity?

And you're like, the fuck does this have to do with like big picture questions? about why the universe is the way that it is. Yeah. And so one of the cool things that I did while working on the edge of space time is that I went for the first time and read Newton in the original. I mean, I say this. I read Newton in translation because I did look at the Latin, but my Latin's not that good.

So I read Principia. Okay. I read parts of Principia. And particularly because, like, you know, one of the things that comes out of Newton's perspective, Newton's perspective on physics is that space is absolute and time is absolute. So there's just a space. You can think of it as a stage where things are happening.

And the stage is just there. Like if you're at like the Pantages theater to pick like my local example at home in L.A. And you're just there. And the stage never changes, but the actors on it change. Time moves forward. The stage has nothing to do with time moving forward. And I was like, how did Newton reason him? that to this conclusion that space is absolute, time is absolute. And then I got to that section

in Principia and the dude was just like, no, I'm just declaring it. I have no story to tell you about this. That is just the way things are. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, dude, that was bold. That's very, very bold. Like you were a very confident white man who was invested in enslavement and colonialism and was getting served by servants who were making sure that you had enough to eat while you were making these very bold claims. But there was something like very interesting about that. And then while I was reading, you know, putting new in contact. Tell me more of the connection between him making the assertion about space time and him being invested in colonialism. I just want to know more about that connection for you.

Well, I guess like, you know, in thinking about people from kind of that time period, I also think about Francis Bacon, who is often thought of as like the father of the scientific method. So he wrote this book, Novum Organum, which I've read, I'm actually, I've already drafted the first draft of my third book, The Cosmos is a Black aesthetic. And so actually I've been thinking about this a lot for that book. So Francis Bacon is kind of understood as the first person who was like, you know, we have to be very careful about how we collect data and keeping bias out of data collection. But in the same book, the Novum Organum where he's making this claim, he's also saying things like man's job. And he's says man, not humanity, not humankind. He says, man's job is to hold dominion over nature, as if that's not an ideological commitment. Right. The other thing is, is that when you pick up English translations of the new organon is what it's called in English, they rarely reproduce the frontist piece that Francis Bacon had, which has like two galleons, like Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria-style colonial boats on the ocean sailing through two giant pillars.

And that was the imagery, that was the aesthetic that he decided went with his theory of empiricism. So Newton is also kind of a product of this era of thinking in the scientific revolution about man's dominion over Earth and the role that developing rules and, and, and, uh, a rule-based understanding of how the universe operates, serves politically. Right. Right. So I think for me, that's the connection, is that, like, there's a very particular

way in which they are politically motivated and socially motivated, not just about here. Like, the story about the apple falling from the tree is, like, cute. But that's not really, like, the picture of who, I mean, this was a guy. He was, like, a cop for the mint. And, like, people got sentenced to, like, having their fingers were removed. He was like Newton's son. He was like not a nice guy. He was an asshole.

But he sort of existed in this world where he was used to being the guy who who set down, here's how things work, right? Where his perspective is the default and the universal perspective. And so he was comfortable saying the way that this is universal what I'm about to say. Right. It was like a natural thing for him to say. Exactly. I think that like that entire time.

time period, you just have like what I like to call on my work the false universal. You just have these guys walking around being like, well, I looked around and I thought of it and I'm pretty cool. So I'm just going to declare that whatever thought I've just pulled out of my head must be universally true. And like to an extent, part of what's impressive about Newton is that despite his very obvious ideological kind of commitments and biases, there were some very interesting things that he established about motion. Like the idea that once something is in motion, unless there's

something impeding it, it will continue to be in motion. And if something is stationary, unless something motivates it to move, it will remain stationary. And so in the process of like trying to kind of situate this in context and understand Newton better, I think I saw like a snippet on Wikipedia or

something like that. That was like actually some philosophers in the Zhao kingdom, which predates Imperial China, had already kind of thought of this and written it down in this book called the Mo Tsu. So, of course, I, like, went looking for translations from what's called ancient Chinese, although Zhao would not have been China. And there were, like, three translations into English of parts of this text.

I think there are two complete translations. And so I sat there and I looked at it, and I was like, oh, so these people were already grappling with the problem of how do we philosophically? understand the difference between extent in space and extent in time. Because they're both lengths in a way. Like, I might say I'm 20 minutes away from the studio. That's actually a statement about distance. It is also a statement about time. And so it got really interesting. I will also say, I annoyed my friends because for three weeks, that was like, those translations were all I would talk about. And I was also, you know, in all of these texts I'm talking about, I'm dependent on humanists who

were doing these translations. Yeah, very good point. You're, you're, you're, uh, dependent on people who are involved in the, actually not even the soft sciences and literally like literature and language and, and that sort of thing. Yeah. So I'm sitting through like, you know, there's huge debate in the literature about some of the characters in these statements. Like, how do we interpret this character? Because ancient Chinese is completely different from like modern Mandarin and Cantonese and, you know, other languages that use that same character set like Taiwanese, et cetera, just completely different. And so there are all these questions of like, there's even been some debate about whether we should interpret this as physics or philosophy.

And I'm like, porque no los dos. Like, it can be both. Yeah, it was throughout most of the history of philosophy and science. They were the same thing. Exactly. Exactly. So I think, For me, that was really fun. And I wish, you know, I have been training as a physicist or working as a physicist since 1999. And 2024 was like the first time that I ever looked at Newton. I had never needed to before. And so there was just also this element of, wow, there's this whole universe there.

So I guess like coming back to like, what would we talk about if we were high in our brush dorm? I'd be like, I don't know, man. I think motion's weird. I want to go back to like the thing you said at the beginning. When you first made that point, you were talking about how, how, you know, motion is sort of immediately comes out of like the Einsteinian, Einsteinian space time. Like, like very, very minimal beginning. You can, you like walked us through like the creation of the universe almost.

That was very mind expanding to me. Tell me again how that makes motion a weird thing, because I got lost in the beauty of that explanation. Yeah, I mean, so I guess, and this comes back to maybe like a big problem that I kind of walk the reader up to towards the end of the book, which is the question of quantum gravity. How do we put Einstein's theory of relativity into conversation with quantum physics? And this is a big open question in physics. Because really, from the point of view of general relativity, we tell one story about the origin and evolution of space on very big scales. Mathematically, relativity is governed by something called Einstein's equation, which you don't, like, as a layperson, you don't need to worry about.

You just need to know that there's this equation. There are different types of space time that we can write down. as solutions to this one equation. So the universe that we live in happens to be described by one of those solutions. And nothing in that solution says that the universe has to have any matter in it. Like relativity doesn't give us any information about particles.

It doesn't require particles. It doesn't mandate particles. And motion is on some level a product So when we think of motion, we're talking about matter moving around, right? And so the only kind of motion that you can really get in an empty relativistic universe is if you have some kind of solution that's causing gravitational waves and the space time itself is moving. But usually the way that you cause gravitational waves where like literally there are ripples in

space time is that you have some kind of matter in it. So if you want matter, quantum mechanics is the thing that. makes matter happen and causes matter to have some sense of motion in a way. And then it becomes kind of this dance with space time where matter and space time are telling each other how to move. So somewhere in the book, I just say shit happens. I actually use that line. I definitely at some point, I can't remember where it was, but somebody asked me, they were like, you cuss in this book. I found that very surprising. And I was like, well, if you've met my mom, the activist Margaret You will know why I use the word fuck a lot.

Like, it's just, it's part of the household vocabulary. It's part of your language. But I also think there, we take for granted that anything will happen in the universe, but there are so many different pieces that need to come together in order for motion to happen in the universe and then for it to happen in the ways that it does. So I guess that's why I will say it's weird is because like it's not guaranteed. that if, and I don't believe in this supernatural, but let's say we wanted to go with intelligent design

as our world, our universe view, that actually intelligent design would really require some very careful setting up of the pieces in exactly the right way to set off the universe and the ways. Like it genuinely would be very intelligent design. I don't think that's how it happened. But I also think maybe it's weird to me

because that's not how I believe it happened. I just think it happened. in that way. And I think that's weird. Do you think it just happened to happen that way? Like, that's just sort of a chance or? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a big, one of the things that I loved doing with the edge of space time was that I started. So I came into physics as a physics student thinking that these kinds of questions that maybe verge on the philosophical were not questions for a

physicists. And I think that the way that we were taught in the classroom kind of reinforces that idea because we're not asked to think about what is space, what is time. What they want us to think about is problem solving skills. Can you solve this kind of problem? And you don't need to understand those questions. And so with this book, I was like, okay, but I want to go back to these big picture questions that like motivated me as a scientist. And in a lot of ways, I was worried that readers would be frustrated because I don't say like, okay, I thought about this question and I now have this very strong opinion about it and I'm going to tell you what to think. A lot of the book kind of is me walking people up to questions and saying, I hope you have this question too now.

Like, that's it. I don't know. And I think that that's one of the ones that lurks, which is like, if the universe is everything, then every answer about the universe has to be somewhere in the universe. and that almost feels like a mental tongue twister or something like that. Right. So I think, you know, I don't know. Well, it means you'll eventually come up to a question where the answer is just a tautology where it's like, why is this? Well, because it is, right?

If every answer about the universe is contained within it, then there'll never be an answer that comes from without of it where, well, because it was somebody's idea. idea or X, Y, Z happened, or, et cetera, it'll always just be encompassed in itself, which is going to be somewhat unsatisfying to us at the end of the day. Well, you know, the book, I think this is maybe a first for a book about science. The book opens with a chapter about metaphor. So it is not at all, like, let's just dive in. Let's talk about Newton's laws. And one of the reasons that I wanted to think through metaphors is that partly I wanted to make the argument that

equations are like metaphors because they're symbols that are meant to kind of represent the universe to us in a particular way. But also, I think understanding things on those terms through the metaphor is kind of like a framework allows us to understand that maybe some of our limitations are right now rhetorical for us, which is that maybe we don't have the scientific vocabulary that we're going to need to understand the question and think about it in those terms. So I had a lot of fun. It was also frustrating sometimes, but I had a lot of fun kind of coming back to these big picture questions and getting comfortable with like what I didn't, I felt like I couldn't explain to people. There's also one point like leader in the book where I can,

I kind of talk my way into being like, actually, I don't know if the particle as a concept is useful to us. Like maybe we don't need particles as a concept anymore. And the reader just kind of, honestly, you read that section and that is you watching me have the thought for the first time. To me, it sounds like you're doing philosophy in this book. You know, when I was, I studied philosophy in college. I say a little bit of physics. But, you know, some of the central problems of of metaphysics or of epistemology are of how do we, uh, it's, you know,

it's cons question, right? Can we ever understand the, the world as it is in itself or are we limited by our own concepts, right? Which to me sounds like when you're talking about metaphor or talking about, you know, when,

when you're at the point of like, is the concept of a particle useful? It feels like you're talking about philosophy rather than physics. And often, you know, physicists and philosophers used to be the same thing, right, around sort of pre-Newton's day. It was sort of, certainly if you go back to like the Greeks or whatever, literally, it was the same thing. But it seems like we get to such a point now where physics becomes complex enough and the questions that we want from it are big enough that we end up diving back into philosophy.

The problem is philosophy will never give you a satisfying answer. Right. it's because it's more it's more art than science almost but that's okay right because i i think the other thing coming back to the political question and the political lesson of the edge of space time is getting comfortable with asking questions and in particular like coming back to you know the framework of metaphor i arrived at that because i was reading a book about craft so i'm a total i mean I guess me saying I'm a nerd is like tautological in context of this conversation. But I'm also like a writing nerd.

So I like collect books about the craft of writing. And one of the ones that I got was how we do it, which is an edited collection pulled together by the poet Jericho Brown and it's black writers talking about the craft of writing. And so I'm like reading it and there's like poet Nikki Giovanni in there. So I like read her contribution. And there was a contribution by the poet and memoirist Natasha Trethaway. that's about the abiding metaphors that kind of shape how we interpret our lives. And for her, this essay is mostly about being the child of a black mother and a white father and kind of the

abiding metaphors of like narratives about the mule and mulatto. And I am, why her father felt it was important for her to understand the figurative. And in this essay, she quotes this essay by Robert Frost, the late 20th century. poet called Education by Metaphor. And she has like this long, it's a paragraph long, and he's talking about why the metaphor is politically important. And he basically says, at the end of it, if you are not comfortable in the figurative, then you don't know where the metaphor may take you, where the metaphor ends, and you are not

safe in science, you are not safe in history. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, I thought I was reading this for craft. I did not think that I was reading this book for like thinking about like what it means to do science and the role that science has and like rhetoric. And so I kind of went down this rabbit hole of asking myself or what are the abiding metaphors that shaped me as a young scientist? Like what stories was I told? For example, about where you make that cut between physics and philosophy. What questions count as physics? What questions count as philosophy? And part of it is the point at which I wrote the edge of space time I had just gotten tenure. So the last time we talked,

I didn't have tenure. Congratulations. Thank you. And it was this really big accomplishment, but also it's an emotionally complicated experience because one of the things that I did immediately after like the board of governors like made their decision is I was like, so what are the questions that I left behind so that I could be professionally successful? And a lot of them were these big picture questions about physics that like you can't

really get paid to think and write about except for general audiences. And so I was kind of using, talking to general audience as an opportunity to spend some time literally at the edge of what I'm allowed to think about about space time and push on that boundary. So I do, you know, this question of what counts is, I went into it thinking these are all philosophical questions, but I think what I wrote myself into in the book is that like that distinction is almost a social construction. And that coming back to the question of like physics as a product of the military industrial complex and as a product of the capitalist like you make things that are useful for society to sell is that then of course the things that are more philosophical can't be physics because it doesn't make products. The way that you talk about sciences is very different from like most scientists I've spoken. with, right?

Or, or most scientists as we commonly imagine them, right? You bring in what I'd love to sort of, I think we, I think we should like embrace it and just call some of this stuff like woke studies, right? You talk about like queer theory, but also like you talk about what is often aligned is like the softest stuff, right, in relation to physics. And we're living in a political moment, just bringing back to politics where all of these modes of inquiry are like truly under attack, right? Where they're being degraded and denigrated at the highest level of society.

And so I'm just a little bit curious, like you are so unapologetic in how you foreground, you know, all this stuff. What is that, what is that like professionally? Do you get like huge amounts of pushback talking about physics this way? Or do you feel that like your peers are, you know, embracing of it, you know? You know, I think part of it is I'm an intellectually promiscuous person. So I just read and like I read like an amazing, I read Farah de Boy Well-I's incredible book about what is free speech last year. And then I became like an evangelist for this book.

And ostensibly it has nothing to do with physics. It has nothing to do with what I do. Except I think one of. I'm like selfishly promiscuous. God, this is like saying a lot about me maybe. But like, I read books for like, what is the say about science or where is the connection? Where is the science in this? And so I think like even that I was kind of like, oh, there's all this interesting stuff about like how race science was the intersection of race science as a mode of thinking and how free speech was being suppressed among enslaved people, for example, through narratives about race science. And so there's, I think one, there's often a connection, maybe especially if you're looking for it. But, you know, the universe is a connected up place.

The boundaries and categories that we put things into is a choice that we make. Yeah. That often serves a kind of purpose. And I tend to just be a very holistic thinker. So I'm looking for like, how are the things connected with each other? The other thing is, is that the edge of space time specifically, you know, as I said earlier, I wanted to take the case for particle physics and cosmology to the people to make an argument to them for why this matters to them, even if they're never going to do any math, even if they like never want to, you know, watch even Project Hail Mary, that this is like politically, spiritually, socially, important to do. Yeah.

And that means, again, coming back to the metaphor, we use metaphors to communicate science to general audiences. And the reason that we use the metaphor is because you start with something that's familiar to people. And then you use that to help them move them into an understanding of something that's end familiar. When you're choosing your metaphors, those are socially contextualized decisions. Yeah. So, like, I can certainly choose a metaphor as if I was a white guy from a very particular time period and a particular place. But I'm not that, right? And so, like, the metaphors that I'm choosing reflect, like, the communities that I come from and the communities also that I want to center.

So as I was writing this book, you know, it's literally the edge of space time. I was thinking about Bell Hooks, the black feminist theorists writing about margin to center. And there's a way in which what I do is I say I'm going to take the people who usually are asked to exist at the margins and put them at the center of how. I do my storytelling about the universe because they are so often not at the center. So there are all kinds like I'm obviously a huge big crit fan. Anybody who reads the book and doesn't pick up on that like missed that I'm just a huge big crit fan. I love Missy Elliott. I also love the Dodgers. I love Jackie Robinson. These things like all come up. I'm you know I also love REM. Although I recently learned on so I have a citation like I have a reference to the song Stan.

And apparently a lot of people hate that song. I didn't know this. But a lot of people really hate that. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, someone was telling me that it's a very hard song to correctly dance to because there are like instructions in it. And I was like, I have never tried to literally dance to the song in the literal like lyric

sense, I guess. But I think like I love pop culture. And I'm a hardcore trekkey, right? So there's like a lot of Star Trek in the book. book opens with an epigraph from Star Trek Discovery. So there was just kind of this element of I am myself and also actually the lesson of the book is stay woke. Like in the traditional before it was co-opted, when, you know, black folks were saying stay woke, they were saying keep your eyes open, be aware of information. Like just focus, pay attention. And like, man, who has a

problem with paying attention. Authoritarians have a problem with us paying attention and knowing that the universe is bigger than whatever bullshit they're trying to feed to us, right? Yeah. I also think that I, you know, just as you talk, I imagine sort of a, a legion of, you know, very stuck in their ways, white guys sort of turning up their noses a little bit and going, you know, like this stuff's silly, right? and but the more you talk about it, the more I just sort of feel bad for them, you know, because they're like,

it's being trapped in a very narrow way of, not just a narrow way of thinking, but like a refusal to like think about your own process of thinking, which limits, you know, how you might do physics or any other, you know, form of science that like, yeah, science is philosophy, is society, is metaphor, is poetry. and if you want to have a full understanding of any of these things, you need to understand where they intersect, where one shapes the other. That gives you more power to understand, you know, equations. If you also understand how metaphor influences your, you know, the way that you, where the equations came from or what they might mean to you. And, yeah, I, I'm just, I'm just enjoying, you know,

tracking how I feel about that as, you're speaking because look, I'm a white guy. I often take that framework. Its universality is so deep in me that sometimes I assume it even when I don't mean to. You know what I mean? And I'm like, I start to question like, well, you know, putting these things in dialogue doesn't make sense. And then when I'm finally able to step out of it and examine all of those presumptions I have, that's when my mind truly gets to expand, you know?

And I feel like your work keeps encouraging me to do that, which is one of the things I really appreciate about it. It makes me feel there's this like presumption that thinking this way, thinking about society or gender or queerness or any of the or what I jokingly called woke studies before, like somehow limits you. It actually expands your ability to understand the world around you. It's a mode of inquiry like any other. Absolutely. I mean, I think like, you know, in terms of. of just thinking about constituencies, I mean, we're having this conversation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court basically killing the Voting Rights Act.

Yeah. And so we could talk about the extent to which black people, just to choose an example, population that I'm a member of, are considered a political constituency in the United States because there are certain actors who are doing their best to ensure that, like, we don't have voting rights in the sense. that we've had for the last few decades. And, but if I take seriously, you know, black folks are about 12% of the U.S. population, something around there.

And that means that, like, if I want to convince people that science and particularly cosmic science and particle physics are an important thing for their tax dollars to be funding an important part of their lives. And I don't assume that that audience is one of the audience that needs to be reached, then I am not being a very good scientific person about making sure that I reach out to all of the constituencies that are out there. So you were asking about whether I get like attacked

and I definitely get attacked. I definitely, you know, when students come to me and they're like, well, how can I have a career like yours? I'm like, your science has to be so solid because people are going to come after you. People are going to ask questions about like the rigor of your work. You're going to be scrutinized for rigor in a way that like other other people are not.

And the thing is is like, I'm killing it as a scientist. Like I have like been unusually, I will say for a particle theorist of my generation, like fairly unusually successful in bringing in grant money. I graduated three PhD students over the course of six years. So like, you know, I'm I'm doing my job and I'm doing it well. And part of that is I have had incredible support from people in my department. But the thing that I've, been thinking about a lot as I worked on this book and as I started doing publicity and marketing

stuff for this book is like you there there are these people walk around complaining about like how I criticize racism in the field and I criticize transphobia and sexism and all of these things and I'm like okay that's fine you can have this issue with me you can try and tear me down there there has been in the last couple of years particularly like a concerted effort by a very specific small group of people to throw bad publicity in my direction and frame me as like this very dangerous person for physics. And I'm like, but which one of us is going on podcast explaining to people why they should care about neutrinos? Right. I am the one going on podcasts explaining why you should, why people should care about neutrinos. Because you're informed by all

this scary stuff that that small group of people don't like. That's why you're doing it. But I'm the one who's out here saying desperately, like really there was an urgency of please save my field. I do not want to be part of the last generation of people who get to do this kind of science. And not just as like a black woman, not just as a black queer person, but I don't want it to be that anybody is part of the last generation, regardless of identity. So if you think that you can raciously, sexistly, transphobically do it better, then go out and do it. But I don't see you going out and do it. I see me being out here and doing it. And so I think like at the end of the day, that's kind of my response is like when you tear me down, you're tearing down one of the fiercest advocates for you being able to get

your actual work done. Attacking me is not real work. But for getting your actual scientific work done. And so I think that that's how I come to think about it, which is that I am confident in my contribution to the public conversation about why what we do is important. And these people are actually attacking science when they attack one of its fiercest advocates. Hell yeah, Chonda, thank you so much. I want to ask you one last question, which is just you talk a lot about metaphor and poetry in the book. And you mentioned a few poets, but I was hoping that you could recommend a poet who will help us think about physics or who influences your, thinking about it the most.

Just because I'm always trying to, I'm like shockingly uneducated in poetry and it's something that I'm trying to bring more into my life. So I was wondering if you could make a recommendation. Okay. So I'll hold up the UK edition of the book while I'm doing this. So the UK edition is out and Europe edition is out on May 7th. And I am, you know, it's got cosmic dream buggy in the subtitle. The subtitle of both of my books, the first book, The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into

dark matter, space time, and dreams deferred. both of them have lines from the same Langston Hughes poem. So I will say without even realizing it, if you've been engaging with my work, you've been reading Langston Hughes. And so Langston Hughes appears quite visibly in the book. Natasha Trothaway, T.S. Eliot's Burton Norton has this great kind of thought piece about time past and time present. And so I include a discussion about that.

I also talk about the A.A. Milne, so people who don't know A.A. Melon. He's the one who wrote all the Winnie the Pooh stories. Right. He wrote a lot of children's poetry and he wrote one called Disobedience, which opens James, James, Morrison, Weatherby, George Dupree, took great care of his mother, though he was only three. Mother, mother, he said, said he must never go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me. This is like the opening stanza. I learned to read with this poem because I had my dad read it to me so many times that I memorized it and started matching the words to the symbols on the page. But like what a great metaphor for a black hole

Because like the next thing that happens is James James Morrison's mother Goes down to the end of the town and hasn't been heard from since Oh my god And we never get any resolution for this at the end of the poem Like so first of all like why is a toddler responsible for his mother? I don't know But there's something about that that kind of just like playfully Gets you into the story

Mothery said, said he, you must never go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me. And I just, so I think part of what I'm saying in the book is that there's a lot of poetry that's about science. Yeah. But there is also poetry that invites you into it and maybe playful and unusual ways. There's a lot of Alice's adventures in Wonderland in the book. So if you're a fan of like the Mad Hatter, I think the Mad Hatter was like a quantum character. Oh, absolutely.

I feel like those things are already linked in my mind for some reason, and I'm not even sure. You know, some of my favorite scientific writing that I read when I was younger was like, I mean, it's, I keep going back to the 70s. My parents had a copy of like Gertell Lesher Bach that book when I was a kid. And that's full of like Alice in Wonderland style stories and, you know, that kind of thing. You know, can I just make a suggestion for your next book? I would love for you to publish like an annotated, like, collection of poetry and literature that reflects on physics, you know? Just like, here's a poem from- Thank you for putting this on air. I'm sending it to my agent.

Yes. As soon as it goes life. Here's some Langston Hughes. Here's some A.A. Milne. You know, here's a little Alice in Wonderland with a little bit of essay by you sort of connecting the dots. I think that would be a wonderful read. Because I love, again, I'm a liberal arts guy. I love how you bring all these things in conversation with each other.

I think it's really beautiful. I'm thinking like one of the poems that I say it. I should also mention is Tracy K. Smith has this incredible collection called Life on Mars. And she has a poem in it. The universe is a house party. And that's just like I think if there's a vibe that I want. I mean, like again, literally the cover is like got this kind of party thing going on. If there's a vibe I want people to have, I want people to be like, the universe is a house party.

And one of the lines in the poem is, and if it's anybody's, it's ours. So I want people to be like, this is a, we are a part of the universe and we're the one part of the universe that we know of that asks these big questions. So it's our house party. So like invite yourself, dance, bookie down, have a good time with it. That's where we're ending. Jonda, thank you so much for coming on the show. The name of the book again, hold it up one more time for us.

You got it right there. That's the UK edition, right? is oh we got both of them. They're like Pokemon. You have to collect them all. The edge of space to, and their color reversed. It's a variant covers. Look at that.

The edge of space on particles poetry and the cosmic dream boogie. Thank you so much for being here, Chanda. Where else can people find you on the internet? So you can find me on Instagram and threads at chanda. Atchonda.prescott. Weinstein. And you can find me on blue sky at chanda. black sky.

And you can also find my website, chanda. dot science. Chanda, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you once again to Chonda for coming on the show.

If you love that interview as much as I did and you want to check out her book, you can, of course, get it at factuallypod.com slash books. Every book you buy their supports, not just the show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode.

ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll put your name in the credits of every single one at my video monologues. And on a normal day, I would read some of those names on the show. But once again, I have shut down my access to the web on my phone to help me focus on things. I have currently scheduled as a timer where from like 8.30 to 5 every day, I can only access like music apps and texts and a couple other things. They'll keep me focused. And I have failed to pay attention to how that would make it very difficult for me,

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