Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s Jewish Universe
Who gets to access the night sky? It’s a seemingly simple question, yet one I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book.
Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist whose work focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter (though she makes a compelling argument for why dark matter shouldn’t be called “dark matter”). You may already be familiar with her, if you’re one of the over 80K people who follow her on Twitter, where she grapples with racism, Judaism, science, politics, and often where all those things intersect. Her new book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, is one of our most anticipated Jewish books for spring 2021 because of how Dr. Prescod-Weinstein brings her unique and necessary perspective to science as a Black Jewish scientist, and how she writes for a more just world.
Throughout the book, she details how she grapples with the universe. “I don’t personally believe in the supernatural, but I still think that there’s something valuable about grappling with this larger question of what is the fabric that we make? And, in some sense, that’s what the book is about,” she explained to me over the phone ahead of the publication of Disordered Cosmos. “I don’t think that I separate my thinking as a Jew from my thinking as a scientist, in that sense, because I’m grappling with the universe, and Judaism is grappling with the universe.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about everything from why her book is not a memoir to the impact of Jewish astronomer Dr. Vera Rubin to the Jewish concept of olam (the world) to why Passover is the best Jewish holiday, naturally.
