“A storyteller of the universe”
Wie ist das Universum entstanden? PRISCILLA TOTIYAPUNGPRASERT stellt die Kosmologin Dr. Chanda Prescod-weinstein vor, die sich auch für Gleichberechtigung in den Naturwissenschaften stark macht.
In her new book, The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-weinstein writes that, when people ask her what she does, she tells them: “I use math to figure out the history of spacetime.” The theoretical physicist, feminist theorist, and cosmologist studies the origin, evolution, and structure of the universe. She has written about “inflation,” the rapid expansion of the universe after its formation. She believes “dark matter” should more accurately be called “invisible matter.” Her research ranges from neutron stars to Black feminist science.
Prescod-weinstein describes herself as many things. After spending the first part of her life in Los Angeles, she moved across the US to attend Harvard University. She has three university degrees and works as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, where she is also on the faculty of the women and gender studies program.
She’s Black, she’s queer, she’s Jewish, and she’s a woman. And she makes it clear that these parts of her identity can’t be separated from the path her career has taken. In radiation and matter, there are particles that help to tell the story of the universe. In Prescod-weinstein, there are particles from her African and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry that help to tell her story.
Growing up in a family of activists
While Prescod-weinstein is best known in the science community for her work in cosmology, she’s also a prominent advocate of equity, or fairness. Everyone should have access to science, she believes.
Men still dominate the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The problem extends beyond the gender gap, though. A 2018 study in the International Journal of STEM Education found that, among university students, women of color don’t feel a sense of belonging in their STEM classes.
“In theoretical physics, as in all human endeavors, identity matters,” she writes for Space.com. “And physics can be a hostile place to those who don’t match the traditional template of a physicist.”
Prescod-weinstein comes from a long line of activists. Her mother was born in a small village in Barbados, a Caribbean island country that was a colony of the British Empire at the time. She landed in New York City in 1961, plunging headfirst into the civil rights movement.
Prescod-weinstein’s father, a descendant of Russian and Ukrainian Jews, grew up with a white mother and Black stepfather. In the early 1970s, his mother founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the UK and distributed pamphlets about sex, race, and class. His stepfather, a Trinidadian Marxist, wrote about the Haitian Revolution and was once jailed on Ellis Island for his political beliefs.
“Until I was ten, I thought being a Jew meant you were a labor organizer,” Prescod-weinstein joked in a 2020 interview with the American Institute of Physics. “I’m very serious. That was my understanding. I knew we were Jewish, but I thought we were Jewish because everybody in the family was a Marxist or a labor organizer.”
The making of a physicist
Prescod-weinstein’s passion for science and mathematics began when she was in grade school. She grew up in El Sereno, a working-class neighborhood of mostly Mexican Americans in Eastside Los Angeles.
She has described her paternal grandfather as a “gadget geek” who introduced her to computers at an early age. When she was 11, Prescod-weinstein sent Stephen Hawking an e-mail, asking him how to become a theoretical physicist. She had already decided to go to university at Harvard or Caltech.
For her 16th birthday, her parents sent her to visit the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Standing in the admissions office, surrounded by boys in khaki trousers, PrescodWeinstein realized two things: One, she was an outsider; two, she didn’t want to go to school with these people.
“I was just dressed the way a kid from East LA would dress, and everybody stopped and stared at me when I
walked into the admissions meeting,” she recalled in an interview.
“It was very disappointing when I got to Harvard to find that I was surrounded by a sizable number of intellectually mediocre students who only got in [because] they were white, basically,” she tweeted in 2020.
The big bang and beyond
On her website, Prescod-weinstein states as her mission: “Science is a collective human endeavor. My goal is to chip away at what we think we know and what we don’t know in order to expand what we actually know.”
She’s not convinced the big bang is as simple as a moment in time and space when everything exploded.
“The truth is that we don’t really know what happened at the beginning of our spacetime bubble,” she said in a 2021 interview with PC Magazine. Prescod-weinstein’s research focuses on the inflation era, which is the period when the universe expanded. Data shows that this inflation cooled the universe down. Directly afterwards, the universe reheated, which was when the galaxies and stars started to form.
In a 2015 blog post on the Medium platform, she compared the reheating of the universe to a child on a swing. “Remember pumping your legs at just the right point to make the swing go higher? You were transferring energy from your body to the swing at the perfect moment to maximize the energy transfer.” At some point, inflation pumped its legs at just the right point for matter to evolve into everything we see in the universe.
Then there’s dark matter
“We know very little about dark matter,” Prescod-weinstein told PC Magazine. “We know that it gravitates like luminous matter. We know that it’s invisible because light typically goes through it. We know that it’s long-lived and isn’t constantly decaying. And we know that it’s cold. That’s about it!”
Normal matter, made of atoms and forming everything we’ve ever observed, makes up only 5 percent of the universe. Dark matter, which we can’t see, is thought to make up 25 percent, and dark energy, a force that repels gravity, appears to make up 70 percent.
“Dark matter is so called because of the idea that it’s like being in a room without a light on,” she wrote in the New Scientist in 2020. “But actually, we know the universe is filled with light.”
Decolonizing science
There’s more to Prescod-weinstein’s work than getting excited about spacetime. She wants science to be accessible to people who are often excluded. “Who’s allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally denied the possibility?” she asks.
Prescod-weinstein has built a public hub for her advocacy, amassing more than 85,000 followers on Twitter. In 2020, a year of global protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, she and fellow Black physicist Brian Nord led a “Strike for Black Lives,” calling on other scientists to shut down STEM for a day.
Her fight for inclusion in the science community has led to numerous awards. In 2017, she received the LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award. Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.”
She was the recipient of the American Physical Society’s Edward A. Bouchet Award in 2021 — for her contributions to theoretical cosmology and for her “tireless efforts in increasing inclusivity in physics.”
In March 2021, she published The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred — a book about cosmology, and how identity politics and physics are entwined.
She writes: “Cosmology is a deeply human impulse — we have always wanted to have a sense of where we came from and why we are here. … To borrow a word from the Indigenous communities that my Black ancestors probably come from, I am a griot of the universe — a storyteller.”