The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Access to a dark night sky—to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is—should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present

I believe we can keep what feels wondrous about the search for a mathematical description of the universe while disconnecting this work from its historical place in the hands of violently colonial nation-states.

Science is supposedly about asking questions, except about scientists and how science is done.

Some might argue that there is human time the social phenomenon and then there is absolute time, the physical phenomenon measured by clocks. The essential point I hope you will take away here is that maybe intuition about space and time isn’t universal and that it has cultural and experiential context. What constitutes intuition and our “gut” feelings about what models of the world make the most sense must therefore also be a social phenomenon. It is something we are taught, rather than something we are born with.

I am genderless yet in my everyday life I am gendered by others. There is a distance between what people believe my gender is an how I feel inside.

Everywhere we go, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, capitalism follows us.

Much more interesting is the question of how we get free. What does freedom look like? When I put this question to artist Shanequa Gay, she told me, "Freedom looks like choice-making without having to consider so many others when I make those choices." I hear in Shanequa's response a deep cry for space to self-actualize, to not always be stuck in survival mode.

Scientist don't like being told they're wrong, and white people don't like being told that they're racist, so you can imagine how white scientist take hearing that they are contributing to dangerous social structures.

From Dr. J Marion Sims’s 19th Century gynecological surgery experiments on unanesthetized enslaved Black women to Tuskegee experiment on Black men and their families to careless uranium mining on Indigenous reservations and nuclear weapons testing that left Pacific Islanders to live and die with the nuclear fallout, the devaluing of Black American lives and Indigenous lives around the world has played a key role in scientific experiment and development.

Part of science, therefore, involves writing a dominant group’s social politics into the building blocks of a universe that exists far beyond and with little reference to our small planet and the apes that are responsible for melting its polar ice caps.

Is our relationship to progress catastrophic?

In other words, many scientists tend to treat science and themselves like an infallible religious authority: the techniques and mild amounts of history we are taught in class and lab are like a religious text with only one interpretation.

But as a scientist, and by that I mean someone who seeks to look past biases to produce convincing and accurate models of how the universe works,

The murders of trans people become a springboard for making a milquetoast point about being nicer to trans people at work, rather than radically restructuring society to protect trans lives.

If our society is defined by white supremacist heterocispatriarchal capitalist values, science must contend with how it is shaped by those values.

calling is actually deeply entangled with white supremacist ableist heterocispatriarchy. But it is.