Ways in the world

The cover of The Disordered Cosmos -
The cover of The Disordered Cosmos -

Scientists have to be brave, and they don’t come much braver than Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In her glorious book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime and Dreams Deferred, written in jaunty yet meticulous prose, she makes us fall in love with particle physics.

For this unique work of popular science, Dr Prescod-Weinstein was shortlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize (non-fiction), and today she takes part in the festival programme of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.

This renowned, scientifically feisty African-American assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire is of Barbadian origin and is the step-granddaughter of Trinidad and Tobago’s outstanding philosopher and historian CLR James.

Like James, her father’s stepfather, her philosophical approach allowed her to see the big picture, so that although her deftly crafted book is about theoretical physics it is a deeply personal narrative in which the author takes us along with her in the task of illuminating the universe with reflections upon the fact that science is not neutral, it is shaped by society and politics, and that who is a scientist is determined by who one happens to be. She confidently allows herself to go where the societal and historical evidence takes her, and we end up with a unique expose about a world in which who can see, who can dream turns out to be a matter of urgent consideration.

The author argues, in response to her revealed theory, that everyone has a fundamental right to understand and experience the universe in all its beauty and complexity, not just the privileged.

The book was chosen five times as either best science book, best non-fiction book or best physics book, won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology and was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

This means that the very world she scrutinises and finds wanting accepts her analysis that like in most fields, science is riven by racism, misogyny and inequalities of race, gender, class, nationality and disability that lie deep in social, economic and academic structures.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein -

The first black woman to hold a tenure-track academic position in theoretical cosmology, she writes, “Physics and math classrooms are not only scenes of cosmology…but also scenes of society, complete with all of the problems that follow society wherever it goes. There is no escape.”

For her the only way forward is to create “room for black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology,” and that means, “radically changing society and the role of physicists within it." Few of us have contemplated science as power, but it is, and Prescod-Weinstein vividly reflects on the ways in which “Science has become a practice of control.”

For us in TT, where we speak at a very different level about the shortcomings of our education system, the analysis brings us up short. We realise that the real conversation about how we prepare our citizens for the future is almost beyond us.

It is not to say that we do not have the intellectual capacity to be brilliant like Prescod-Weinstein or Tonya Villafana, who was educated in TT and is now global franchise head, research & development, at AstraZeneca, driving clinical programmes in vaccines that put her in the forefront of developing the covid19 vaccine, But we must always make the time and space in schools to spot that brilliance and encourage it, even if the big breaks occur later on outside of TT.

Taking part in the same NGC Bocas Lit Fest exposé and call-to-action event (5-6 pm) as Prescod-Weinstein is the prize-winning UK author of Guyanese origin Anita Sethi, whose new book I Belong Here: A Journey along the Backbone of Britain (a Bookseller’s book of the month) is the first of a trilogy that blends memoir, nature writing and current affairs to explore identity, nature, place and belonging. Sethi uses the British landscape as a lens through which to pose questions about the world we live in and each individual’s place in it.

She was the unfortunate victim of a verbal race-hate attack on a trans-Pennine train in 2019 and it propelled her to reclaim her own space in Britain by recording her trek along the Pennine Way, which runs through northern England and also connects the north with the south, east with west.

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Sethi comes to realise that the world of adventure or nature writing, as in particle physics, as revealed by Prescod-Weinstein, is the domain of “privileged white men,” which reinforces the prejudice that people of colour only belong in urban settings. She set about challenging that view and reality. She got her attacker arrested, charged and taken through the courts, where he was found guilty and convicted, which is not the usual outcome of verbal race-hate crimes.

It may not be coincidental that both writers have had to manage the traumatic fallout of violence – Prescod-Weinstein was raped by a fellow scientist – and for both the only possible way of coping has been to carry on and allow the personal to become political in their respective fields.

The virtual festival ends this evening, is free, streaming on YouTube, Facebook and www.bocaslitlfest.com

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