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Do you ever feel like your imagination is being pummeled by an endless churn of bad news? Depressing headlines, hateful rhetoric, and dire predictions can leave us locked in a cycle of painful reaction. How can we envision a way forward without minimizing the harsh realities of the present? Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, offers an unexpected answer. On its surface, this is a book about physics — quantum mechanics, black holes, and dark matter. But it’s also a profound exploration of how we think, and the possibilities that emerge when we reject the limits imposed on our imaginations.

Prescod-Weinstein, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and core faculty in women’s and gender studies, brings a unique perspective to both cosmology and social justice. Her research spans theoretical physics and Black feminist science studies, and in this book, she takes readers on a cosmic journey that connects neutron stars to poetry, quantum theory to pop culture, and our place in the universe to our struggles here on Earth.

This week, I caught up with Prescod-Weinstein to discuss curiosity and cosmic wonder, the mythology of genius, Deep Space Nine, and how to think beyond false narratives and manufactured inevitabilities.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kelly Hayes: In a moment shaped by fascism, genocide, and climate crisis, what does it mean to you to be a cosmologist? Has this period changed how you think about your work, your responsibilities, or what science is for?

Reclaiming Possibility: A Rant Against Despair

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I’m writing against despair. A sense of the big, of the wonders of the cosmos, and also the strange, like quantum theory, reminds us that the universe still holds curiosity and possibility for us. My thinking about cosmic science in this particular moment is shaped by something my mom told me, that people need to know that the universe is bigger than the bad things that happen to us. My mom, Margaret Prescod, has spent her whole life organizing, but as she said to me while I was starting work on The Edge of Space-Time, “Without joy, what the fuck is the point?” Joy is part of how we refuse the totalitarian function of dystopian politics. I was on a panel recently with Kate Marvel, who trained as a cosmologist but is now a climate scientist, and she said that cosmology helps her remember why Earth is worth saving. Every other planet we’ve found with astronomical observation is a trash planet compared to Earth, at least when it comes to habitation. I thought that was a good point, too.

Well, I want to note that, two chapters into The Edge of Space-Time, I hurriedly bought another copy to share with someone I love, because I feel like this book is doing something very important, particularly for people being captured by false narratives, false binaries, and manufactured inevitabilities. It offers a chance to think expansively about the universe in ways that can help set our minds loose. But before I go on too much about why I think people should read this book, I want to ask: what did you want this book to open up for people? What kind of conversation, or shift in perception, were you hoping to facilitate?

One of the ways that authoritarianism works on us is by foreclosing on imaginative possibilities. Thinking about the fundamental nature of space-time, the quantum physics of particles, and the idea of quantum gravity resists that foreclosure. We know how to use space-time as a concept, but we don’t really understand it, metaphysically. The fact that anything happens at all — that shit happens — is kind of odd when you think about it. Even when a region of space is completely empty, it’s still filled with energy, and we don’t really know how to account for what we measure. All these really basic things that we don’t understand, which call out to us to use our imaginations — to recognize that the edge of what we know isn’t actually all there is to know. That part is important: knowing there is more to the universe than we’ve been told. Plus,........

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