Chanda Prescod-Weinstein > Quotes

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“Science is supposedly about asking questions, except about scientists and how science is done.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“Everywhere we go, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, capitalism follows us.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“Much more interesting is the question of how we get free. What does freedom look like? When I put this question to artist Sheniqua Gay, she told me, "Freedom looks like choice-making without having to consider so many others when I make those choices." I hear in Sheniqua's response a deep cry for space to self-actualize, to not always be stuck in survival mode.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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,”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“There is a bizarre cultural tendency to treat physicists in particular as fascinating enigmas whose brains exist beyond the realm of everyday human politics. This isn’t true. The universe—including the human corners of it—is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more and no less.

People who saw the 2023 Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer may have walked away with the impression that the early 1940s were the glory days of genius white men who very unfortunately had to deal with complex moral questions and often made bad choices. In the chapters to come, some of the men portrayed in Oppenheimer appear, as do individuals from the same era who aren’t represented in the film. Some of them were real assholes. I mean assisting Nazis. I mean pursuing romance with underage teenage girls. I mean not doing much to facilitate the participation of women in physics, ignoring the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, doing little to push the boundaries of Jim Crow, and allowing women to be relegated to second-class social status, subservient to them. Even a bright thinker can be among the worst of us. You’ve already met a famous example: Isaac Newton, who invested in enslavement and, as master of the Royal Mint, was an unforgiving cop.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

“To be a Black feminist physicist is to be a set of apparently contradictory frameworks trying to coexist, trying to coalesce. I want to understand. I want to reject the politics of frontier science.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie

“If our society is defined by white supremacist heterocispatriarchal capitalist values, science must contend with how it is shaped by those values.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“Is our relationship to progress catastrophic?”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“It’s physically impossible to add speed to the light, which means the speed of light is constant and the same in every frame of reference no matter how that frame of reference is moving relative to where the light source is.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“calling is actually deeply entangled with white supremacist ableist heterocispatriarchy. But it is.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

“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.”
― Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred