Book Club Edition: “The Edge of Space-Time” by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

**Matt Kaplan** (0:04)
The Edge of Space Time, this time on Planetary Radio Book Club Edition.
Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor for the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across the solar system and beyond. It was our May selection for the Society's Book Club. It encompasses literally everything in the universe, from quarks to galaxies, along with the dark matter that holds those galaxies together. It also has one of the most enticing and intriguing titles anyone in our universe could hope for, The Edge of Space-Time, Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. The Los Angeles Times called it astonishing and I'm inclined to agree. I've read a lot of books about physics and cosmology, but never before one that so astoundingly ties these fields to culturally aware poetry, hip hop, the prescient cosmologies of ancient thinkers and the dire challenges faced by science and scientists in 2026 Let's meet its author, Dr. Chanda Prescott-Weinstein.
She is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a core faculty member in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She conducts award-winning theoretical physics research on dark matter and neutron stars, and also does research on black feminist science studies. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime and Dreams Deferred, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, and the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. She is also a columnist for New Scientist magazine. So please help me welcome Dr. Prescod-Weinstein. Welcome, Chanda.

**Chanda Prescod-Weinstein** (2:14)
Hi, thank you for having me.

**Matt Kaplan** (2:16)
It is a great pleasure. And it was a great pleasure to read this book. Challenging at times, I will say, when we really got into the thick of it, as you tried to explain some things that ever since humans conceived of them, like quantum mechanics, have been difficult, I think, to explain. But I think you did an admirable job.
Let me start where you do, with a quote from the great Langston Hughes.
Good morning, daddy. Ain't you heard the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred? Which, of course, you incorporated into the title of the book. So what to you is the dream boogie, and why do you celebrate this epic poem in a book that is largely about physics and cosmology?

**Chanda Prescod-Weinstein** (3:06)
So I think you may have noticed that this poem is actually cited in the subtitle of both of my books. So it appears in The Disordered Cosmos, which ends as dreams deferred. It also appears in The Edge of Space-Time, which has the cosmic dream boogie. And the name of this section of, this is from a book length poem called Montage of a Dream Deferred. And the name of this section is called Dream Boogie. In it, Langston Hughes is talking about the beauty and the brilliance of the blues and also the grief and trauma that the blues emerge from and represent, particularly for black life in the United States. So the boogie woogie rumble in particular, I think really in that line, he captures that feeling of there is great joy and brilliance and genius and noise and excitement and also grief. And I think in a lot of ways, I knew while I was writing The Edge of Space-Time that it was going to emerge into a political moment where people were feeling a lot of those emotions at the same time.
The audience that I think about when I'm writing is an audience that is trying to grapple with what's difficult about the world and figuring out what it means to be hopeful.
I wanted to address that head on in a book about physics, where I'm asking people to spend a few hundred pages thinking about how the universe works and all of these things. It seemed, at least on the surface, like they're very detached from everyday life. I wanted to acknowledge that there are other things happening in the world and then actually use that as a way to draw people in and say that doing the work of spending time with physics can actually help you with these other pieces. And then I also wanted to say that the universe itself is a boogie-woogie rumble. It's frustrating, it's hard, it's difficult, and also it's beautiful and glorious and exciting and poetic. And so I just feel like that line captures it. There's also a personal element, which is that Langston Hughes just echoes in my brain a lot. So some of this book is like, if you have physicist brain, if you have black queer physicist brain, this is what the universe looks like. So welcome inside my brain.