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Episode 526: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s Literary Reading of the Universe
142 Plays44 minutes ago
"This is also me saying here's a literary reading of the universe through physics. There's a way you can read The Edge of Space-Time as me doing close-reading for a few 100 pages. I'm close-reading equations. I'm close-reading Dirac. I'm close-reading Hawking and Ellis, but it's all different versions of a literary practice," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon Books).
Coming at you at the speed of sound, CNFers, with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who is the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and her latest book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. It’s published by Pantheon Books.
She is an associate professor of physics and core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her work lives at the intersection of particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics and she’s also a theorist of Black feminist science studies.
Her book is accessible, for sure, but it’s mind-bendy and it strikes me as the kind of book you want to read twice. One, it’s good company, and two, the material she translates is really difficult to get your head around, but that’s the nature of the quantum mechanics, and general relativity, and particle physics, and how the hell did we get here in the first place? Gah!
So Chanda talks about:
- The publishing business in conversations she had with CNF Pod alum Keith O’Brien
- Writing for Black and queer audiences
- The different selves who approach the page
- Paying attention to acknowledgements
- Epigraph rights and how they set the vibe
- The fork in the road researchers face when they write a pop science book
- Physicist brain
- A literary reading of the universe
- The world keeps happening while you’re writing
- Understanding metaphors
- And what Newton and Einstein might talk about if they sat down at a bar together
Be sure you visit Chanda’s website chanda.science and follow her on Instagram at chanda.prescod.weinstein.
This episode will pair well with:
- Episode 103: Persistent, Constant, Careful Work with Dennis Overbye
- Episode 111: The Empowering and Exciting Nature of Film with Emer Reynolds
- Episode 307: Greg Brennecka
- Episode 334: Katrina Miller
- Episode 395: “The Six,” Mini-Deadlines and the Twang with Loren Grush
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Pitch Club
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, ACNFers, I know I ask a lot of you. i ask for your time. That's huge. And then I have the gall to ask for ratings and reviews. What an asshole. I also ask that you check out Pitch Club at welcometopitchclub.substack.com.
00:00:15
Speaker
Pitches ranging from agent queries, feature stories, and off-the-cuff, unhinged essay pitches, and more. We've got some really great ones coming up. ah Daniel Pollack-Pelsner's pitch to Lin-Manuel Miranda, you might have heard of him, to be his biographer, and my overview for the frontrunner the in the book proposal, just to name a couple.
00:00:36
Speaker
Maybe even one of my failed pitches with a response from an editor about why it sucked ass. Forever free, you read a little, you listen a little, and you'll learn a lot. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. Like as I say in the intro, the universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism.
00:01:00
Speaker
Oh, hey, CNFers, if I happen to you already.
Meet Shonda Prescott-Weinstein
00:01:03
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. It's a show where I talk to tellers of two tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Meara, the voice of a generation.
00:01:11
Speaker
Coming at you at the speed of sound, CNFers. We've got Shonda Prescott-Weinstein, who is the author of The Disordered Cosmos, A Journey into Dark Matter, Space-Time, and Dreams Deferred, and her latest...
00:01:29
Speaker
is The Edge of Space-Time, Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. It's published by Pantheon Books. She's an associate professor of physics and a core faculty member in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.
00:01:46
Speaker
Her work lives at the intersection of particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics, and she's a theorist of black feminist science studies. Her book is accessible, for sure, but it's mind-bendy, and it strikes me as the kind of book you want to read twice.
00:02:03
Speaker
ah One, it's good company, and two, of the material she translates is really difficult to get your head around. ah you you know As you're reading and you're trying to... Figure it out as you're reading. It's kind of like when you're not good at a language and you're too busy translating Spanish into English in your head as instead of just understanding the Spanish.
00:02:24
Speaker
Does that make sense? But that's the nature of quantum mechanics and general relativity and particle physics and how the fuck did we get here in the first place? Gah! Showing us at this episode more at BrendanAmero.com, hey, where you can find links to what episodes rhyme with this one, blog posts, and to sign up for my two forever free newsletters, Pitch Club and Rage Against the Algorithm.
00:02:49
Speaker
There's also Patreon.com slash CNFpod, which grants you coaching calls, access to Flash 52 sessions, and the satisfaction that you're helping out the podcast. It's free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:03:01
Speaker
So Shonda was supposed to come by for her first book, but it fell through. Publicist, am I right? But I saw on the gram that she had a new book coming out, and I was like, damn, let's do this.
00:03:17
Speaker
oh One of the few utilities of social media is how I find out about books. ah Here's a little inside baseball. okay So yeah, I get a lot of author pitches from publicists and authors themselves. ah But sometimes, often, i don't know, maybe a quarter, maybe a third. No, not as high as a third.
00:03:35
Speaker
Let's just say between 10 and 25% of the book. That's a big range. Sometimes I see someone celebrating a book on Instagram. It could be the author themselves or it could be someone shouting out a friend.
00:03:49
Speaker
And I'll be like, well, shit, let me tell you about this podcast taking the world by storm one drizzle at a time. And that's how I often
Challenges for Black and Queer Writers
00:03:58
Speaker
book a lot of guests. So, yes, it's all part and parcel. How's that for inside baseball?
00:04:04
Speaker
So Shonda talks about the publishing business and conversations she's had with CNF pod alum Keith O'Brien, writing for black and queer audiences, the different selves who approach the page, paying attention to acknowledgements, epitaph rights, and how they set the vibe.
00:04:20
Speaker
The fork in the road researchers face when they decide to write a pop science book. Physicist brain. a literary reading of the universe. The world keeps happening while you're writing. Understanding metaphors. And maybe what Newton and Einstein might talk about if they sat down at a bar together. be sure you visit Shonda's website at shonda.science, and that's Shonda, C-H-A-N-D-A, dot science, and follow her on Instagram, at shonda.prescott.weinstein. If you're looking for the charcuterie board of what this episode pairs well with, you're going to want to look at episode 103, Persistent, Constant, Careful Work with Dennis Overby. That was kind of a weird one. When I recording with Dennis, he was he was not into it. Smart. One of those oddball interviews early in the podcast run. Doesn't matter. It's fine. It was good in the end. But he I can tell you just didn't appear. he was like He kind of had that look on his face like, what what are we doing?
00:05:18
Speaker
what What is this? what is a What's a podcast? He just had that vibe. Episode 111, The Empowering and Exciting Nature of Film with Emer Reynolds. Episode 307 with Greg Brenica. That deals with meteors and meteorites. Episode 334, Katrina Miller, who is a physicist, and she's kind of pivoted more to writing and journalism, but we talk about her Wired piece at the time, and she's doing a lot of good work with New York Times.
00:05:43
Speaker
Wrote a lot about the
The Evolution of Writing
00:05:44
Speaker
Artemis stuff, among other things. And up episode 395, The Six, Mini Deadlines and The Twang with Lauren Grush. Parting shot on the click. That's click with a CK. But for now, here's Shonda Prescott Weinstein. I go
00:06:07
Speaker
three days without writing. feel fucked up and, you know, depressed. I like to write books that sound more like someone telling a story over a campfire. Then you got to keep moving on because tick, tick, you know, tick, tock. This is going have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:06:32
Speaker
on Instagram, Keith O'Brien kind of giving giving you some props for for your new book. And then you know Keith is on the show and I've been a fan of his writing for a long time. And it was like, oh, cool. like How do you guys know each other?
00:06:44
Speaker
The funny thing about this is that we actually met in Los Angeles at a party that Tracy Thomas from the Stacks was hosting. And it might even have been that Tracy was like, New Hampshire, New Hampshire, you two should talk to each other. This was during the the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books weekend.
00:07:03
Speaker
And then we figured out that he and I lived near each other here on the New Hampshire seacoast. And so we're kind of like local, like we share the same independent bookstore as our local indie. Nice. And we know like some doctors in common and that kind of thing. I'm pretty sure actually that I got my last mammogram from his wife. So we we figured this out recently because I saw him post something and I was like, wait, that's where I got my mammogram. And he was like, that's my wife. And I was like, oh, cool. Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
That is funny. And that it's got to feel good to, it's always good to commune with other writers. And, you know, he's primarily a sports writer and you're primarily a science writer. So I imagine that conversations that you might have about, you know, craft or writing your books, it's um it's kind of furtive because you're in such different silos, so to speak, but you're also working with language and working with words and trying to make things pretty and propulsive. So I imagine conversations like that are, yeah, just pretty energizing.
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, I think one of the funny things also about the connection initially is that at the time that we connected, I had just signed with Pantheon Books to do the Edge of Space Time. And he was promoting his last book with Pantheon Books. This is before he made the jump to, think he's on Atrio now, right?
00:08:22
Speaker
So there was also, i think one of our early bonding moments was actually when PRH made the really unfortunate decision to fire Elisa Lucas, who was the head of Pantheon. So I think one of the ways that Keith and I have connected is just over the the sheer like business aspect of like being a writer and figuring out what that means in this like I don't know if changing time for the industry is the thing to say, maybe trying time for the industry, particularly as nonfiction writers. And I guess most especially as people who don't write romantic, which seems to be like the hot genre right now.
00:09:02
Speaker
But I do think his book was one of the books that i like his last book for Pantheon, I think is one of the books that I picked up when I was getting a sense of like, what are the kinds of things that Pantheon does? And i was originally supposed to work with Maria Goldberg, who was his editor at Pantheon.
00:09:22
Speaker
In a sense, I was kind of looking at him as an exemplar of what like my career at Pantheon might be like. Yeah, what are some of the other conversations that maybe you were having, those business-y type conversations? so Because those are such good behind-the-curtains things that a lot of writers who listen the show might might not really know about. you know We know about the writing. and We know about like structure and narrative and stuff of that nature. But there's all these mechanics behind the scene that really ah enable that that work to get out there. So yeah what were some of those conversations like?
Publishing Decisions
00:09:52
Speaker
One of the things that I was thinking a lot, thinking about a lot and making the move from bold type books and even taking the edge of space time to market and figuring out what the home for it would be was figuring out, for example, do i want to be at a place with a very strong science writing tradition that this is one of their emphases, is one of their focuses. And so for example, Knopf as an imprint has someone on staff who's like full-time science editor, this is what they do.
00:10:26
Speaker
And Pantheon doesn't have that. So part of the conversation was like, part of what I do like in the edge of space time science writing. That's clearly the core of the book. That's the foundation of the book.
00:10:38
Speaker
But it's also the case that I put a lot of attention into cultural elements and that I'm particularly concerned with, like as a black person, as a queer person, writing to black and queer audiences that science books and especially physics books are not always written to.
00:10:55
Speaker
And what house is going to be supportive of me in doing all of those things simultaneously? So for me, Pantheon was really attractive, partly because Lisa Lucas was there and I felt like she understood my vision. And i also wanted to be at a place that was helmed by a black woman.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so that was that was that was part of the deciding factor. And I think that this part of it can be a little bit opaque for readers. what goes into because like, you know, people think of like, well, your name is on the book, it's your book. But there's also an element of this of who was actually going to accept the manuscript that I was likely to turn in. And I don't mean that like I don't get edits. And in the end, I ended up working with Denise Oswald. And Denise was great and really supportive. And also when I said like, I really want to have the opportunity to work with Nicole Chung as a freelance editor.
00:11:52
Speaker
Pantheon supported that and brought Nicole in. And so I was like very lucky to get support in the ways that I i needed it and and felt I wanted it. And my agent, Jessica Papan, was like incredible at like facilitating all of this. But there are like so many different pieces that kind of go into creating that freedom for yourself and creating that space and time for yourself, right?
00:12:15
Speaker
That I think... Wasn't obvious to me as a first time author when I wrote The Disordered Cosmos and certainly wasn't obvious to me as a first time author who didn't have a lot of options. Like in the end, that book only had one offer. And luckily it was my first choice. And so like it turned out to be a good match. And Katie O'Donnell, like both type books was like amazing. And then she left. Right. And so there was this thing of like having to find a new home. And I just think there are a lot of things about that that shape the outcome of what the project is that right aren't obvious.
00:12:48
Speaker
yeah Yeah, that's really well put. It's funny, in the acknowledgements of The Edge of Space Time, you wrote, like, every single day, a different version of me came to the text and added, revised, and synthesized. It's a weird process. And that struck out to me just as we ah as we attack, especially a long project ah that's going to take upwards of a year or more to write. Yeah, there is a different version of us that's always come to the page that we've synthesized how they're reading and and suddenly maybe our voices are changing a little bit and we're like, we're kind of like pubescent in a way. where we are like emerging into a different version of ourselves. But ah at the same time, we got to keep that work at hand tonally ah uniform, so to speak. So I don't know, just kind of speak to that sentence because that really struck out to me.
Community Influence on Writing
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah. So maybe the example that I can pick is like I write in the book about some about a Jiao Kingdom philosopher and a community of philosophers that created this text called the Motsu, which I got into because I had read somewhere. I think it might have been on Wikipedia that one of Newton's laws actually appeared in this text on basically a millennium before Newton. I think over a millennium before Newton. And so I wanted to dig into this and like learn more about it. And this led to either two or three weeks of me just basically full time being obsessed with the mozi and like these translations of it. and um another...
00:14:16
Speaker
ancient text from around the same time the Huang Nizi and like I was just super focused on that and so then the parts of the book that I wrote during that time period reflect the fact that like that's all I would talk about to anybody like my poor spouse knows more about this than he probably wants to know My friends, like I have a friend, a philosopher friend that I have a regular catch up with and like she had to hear me go on and on about this for like a good 45 minutes on like our monthly hangout during that time period.
00:14:50
Speaker
And so, of course, the the book at that point starts to reflect that I'm having this like very obsessive. And then so of course, during revisions, I'm going back and figuring out like, what if this do I keep? What if this do I throw out? And I actually did keep a lot of it. But there were parts of it that were like, okay, I have to throw it out. And and so that was one version of me. That's like one snapshot of me.
00:15:13
Speaker
That on a level was like a new me that became integrated. Like i will be talking about the mozi for about mozi and, you know, that that text for like the the rest of my career.
00:15:26
Speaker
But like it is a different version of yourself. I think the other thing is, is that I was I was going through some things personally that. I haven't, I won't be talking about publicly, but i was going through struggles at the time and also trying to figure out I've committed to write this book about like how amazing the universe is. And the struggle of digging deep to find that feeling varied from day to day, depending on like how things were going.
00:15:57
Speaker
So there's like also, you know, different parts of my community were were being there and supporting me. And i think that that also shines through and like what ended up being emphasized in the text and even like maybe the little inside jokes that I put into the text kind of reflect like what community I felt like strongly in conversation with at various points.
00:16:17
Speaker
And there is it is like an odd thing because not everybody comes at it every day. But once I really start getting getting into writing, I do work on it every day. And it really has to be taken away from me. Otherwise, I will keep revising. Yeah, I love this idea that you bring up of support and community support, almost having writing a book and being a writer in general, being more of a team sport than this, like the famed, very solitary writer in a cabin, which by all accounts can be kind of fun. But by and large, you know, we do need we do need a group. We need a ah a village to raise a book. um So for you, how important is a writing community and a science community to the to the work you do?
00:17:01
Speaker
I really appreciate that you read the acknowledgments. I think i because I actually i I spend a lot of time thinking about like what should go in the acknowledgments. And also i read the acknowledgments of books partly because like I like to see who does this person think they're accountable to you. Like who do they see themselves as being in conversation with. And so obviously like one of the people that gets like a relatively long thank you is Brian Shuvie, is a fellow theoretical physicist. He's a particle physicist at Harvey Mudd College.
00:17:34
Speaker
He's kind of really awesome about being a gut check with me, like when I'm like, can I say this? Does this mislead the reader? and he was also the physicist who read the text and was like, fix this.
00:17:49
Speaker
I don't think this was great. He wouldn't take any money from me about it. i was like, I will pay you. And he was like, absolutely not. So that's an example of like one of the ways in which I think Brian, one of the reasons Brian is such a great writer friend and reader for me is because occasionally he would be like, I think you wanted to say something like, like he knows me well enough to notice when I forgot something and would sometimes remind me, i think that you would want to mention blah. And I'd be like, oh yes, I didn't mention that, but you're right. I will be sad if it's not there. So that's like, ah I think that that's one example
00:18:26
Speaker
i There's also my Star Trek community. so the book opens with an epigraph of the first, the opening sequence from season two of Star Trek Discovery. So the opening monologue with Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham telling the story i am from the Kamenbathwa people of Southern Africa.
00:18:48
Speaker
You know, for an epigraph, yeah there are rights issues or copyright issues that come up. And that's not like, a well, I just fill out the form at the publisher's website and they have a standard way of dealing with this because it's poetry or a song or whatever. That's you have to get permission from Paramount.
00:19:09
Speaker
This is before the sale goes through, right? So I think it might be a completely different thing post-Paprogram. sale. And so I just mentioned to my friend, Heather Ray, i was like, I've been trying to figure out how i'm going to get permission for this. I've been starting to try and work like my legal network connections.
00:19:27
Speaker
And they were like, Oh, give me a couple of days. And a couple of days later, I get an email from John Champion. And John is like, I heard that you needed permission for this thing.
00:19:38
Speaker
Give me a couple of days. And i think it might have been a couple of weeks. But within a few weeks, I get this email from like a high ranking lawyer at Paramount that's like, I give you permission to use the following.
00:19:49
Speaker
And i didn't have to pay for it. And that was entirely just like the Trekkie network, like just working. So my Trekkie community, you know i think epigraphs give the book a particular feeling.
00:20:02
Speaker
it kind of sets the reader as like, this is the vibe I want you to read the first sentence with. And so without that, the reader goes into the story with a very different vibe. So I think those are a couple of examples of the way in which community ended up really shaping the book.
00:20:17
Speaker
Oh, that's wonderful. You know, there's always, ah I believe, and maybe I'm presuming as a PhD in, you know, what you know your your field of cosmology, you know, any researcher, there's a fork in the road where you want to like kind of stay just in the kind of the instructor researcher route or be a communicator to to like do some...
00:20:36
Speaker
pop writing, pop science, even if it's very granular, like there's that there's that definite split in
From Physics to Pop Science
00:20:43
Speaker
the road. So for for you, what did that decision look like? Or how are you thinking about that to be able to, you know, I've got my researcher rusher route, but I also want to write books of this nature that help bring it to a more broad audience.
00:20:58
Speaker
You know, it's interesting because my entree into theoretical physics as a possible career path was Errol Morris' documentary, A Brief History of Time, about Stephen Hawking.
00:21:09
Speaker
And so my first, like, proper... science writing book about physics with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which was given to me by my uncle Peter, who I dedicate, partly dedicate the edge of space time to.
00:21:22
Speaker
One of the things that I did after I got the book is I looked up Stephen Hawking's email address and sent him an email and was like, how do you become a theoretical physicist? And one of his graduate students responded. And this was like 1993, 1994.
00:21:36
Speaker
So from my point of view, being a theoretical physicist meant that at some point you did something like this. I never really had a concept of the career without it. I think the thing that was different for me is that, you know, traditionally you do something like this after you get tenure yeah and you do something like this after you have some thing that like you're really famous for in the scientific community and you want to make the case to the public for it.
00:22:03
Speaker
And I wrote my first book, The Disordered Cosmos, within a year of becoming a faculty member and still being kind of on the young side intellectually. I was already in my late 30s, but that's still young career wise.
00:22:18
Speaker
By the time i did that, I think I was shaped a lot by coming of age during the physicist blogging era. so when I was in graduate school, we were all reading Clifford Johnson's Asymptosha, and we were reading Sean Carroll's personal blog, and we were also reading his co-blog.
00:22:37
Speaker
at Discover Magazine with other folks and all hanging out in the comment sections and talking to each other. And actually a comment that I wrote on one of Sean's posts, Sean sent me an email and was like, this was a really great post. Would you like to turn it into a blog, like a guest blog entry for my personal blog?
00:22:55
Speaker
And so that was like the first time, and it was, I guess I should add on to that, the the blog entry that I was responding to by Sean was a response to my one of my PhD advisor's books, The Trouble with Physics. So Lee Smolin had written this provocative book called The Trouble with Physics that was a critical analysis of the intellectual place of string theory and theoretical physics.
00:23:21
Speaker
And was basically saying there's not enough intellectual diversity in discussions about quantum gravity in physics. And so Sean wrote a fair but critical response to this.
00:23:34
Speaker
And I was sitting there, you know, this young black queer person Reading it and I was like you guys keep using diversity, but it's a bunch of white guys arguing about things that a bunch of white guys do And this was basically the meat of my comment and so sean was like this is a really good point about like how diversity is being used and what gets lost And so I wrote this piece about intellectual diversity and at that point I was also doing a lot of leadership work in the national society of black physicists and so I think a combo of things happened, which was one, I was surrounded by physicists who were writing. Like Lee had set that example with writing The Trouble with Physics.
00:24:12
Speaker
Everybody was hanging out on the blogs. And so I started a blog called The Disordered Cosmos, where i wrote about physics, but I also wrote about issues like the lack of black women in physics and statistics about and that kind of thing. And so that was kind of how I got on the path.
00:24:29
Speaker
And then i was very lucky to join the faculty in a department where they were like, yes, we will allow you to do that pre-tenure and not use it against you. Whereas like a lot of places that would be like, you can't get tenure if you write a book before tenure.
00:24:43
Speaker
Huh. Yeah, that's wild that the the fact that you would write this thing that would actually shine favorably on your work in the institution you're employed by. and But yet that's like a strike against your record. Like that's very surprising to me.
00:24:56
Speaker
It's very, and I will say, guess like Sean doesn't talk about this a lot, but it's public. So I think it's ah okay to mention that my first year of graduate school, I had met Sean when I was an undergraduate. I was a summer REU student at the University of Chicago. So I was a summer research student and I had met Sean and thought like he was so cool. And then when I was in my senior year of college, I had used his general relativity notes as part of my how I got through my my graduate general relativity class. that i was I was the only undergrad, I was the only woman in the class, and I was like reading his notes, and that was part of how I got through it.
00:25:32
Speaker
And then during my first year of graduate school, I'm pretty sure was my first year, he published those notes into a textbook, which is now maybe the most widely used general relativity textbook in the country. And I managed to get my hands on it before he did. i don't know how that happened, but I had like pre-ordered a copy. and he came to Santa Cruz, where I was a graduate student at the time, and I asked him to autograph it. And he wrote this like very nice, like hopefully some help at the start of ah a great career in physics note, which i it's actually sitting on the shelf behind me as as we're talking right now. Nice. And then like later that year, he quite like infamously was denied tenure at the University of Chicago.
00:26:11
Speaker
And i was absolutely horrified. I knew he had written a very important paper in cosmology in addition to writing this textbook, but also as a young person, I didn't really understand that writing a textbook might actually be considered a strike against you. And So I think that there were, you know, the thing about something like that, and I'm like so thrilled that like Sean's career has continued and he's thrived and he's made huge contributions to both philosophy and physics as well as like science communication. Like he's just kind of doing it all and it's been incredible. And he's just like forged forward. So for him that ended up not being a career ender, but for a lot of people, something like that would be.
00:26:52
Speaker
And when you do something like that to someone, it's not just impacting the person who doesn't get tenure. It's a threat to everybody else, which is like, if you do something like this, this could happen to you. And that became kind of a formative story for me of like, there is real danger here in being someone who makes it easier for people to know physics and connect with physics and experience it.
00:27:19
Speaker
I do think academia has a huge problem with that, that they haven't figured out how to value it. And a lot of that comes down to money. ah So when you're setting a setting down to write, and a metaphor is so key to to this book, especially you ah open up with, ah you know, just talk about Robert Frost and metaphor. And metaphor is so key to make the layperson understand as so much of the complexity of your area of research. Among others. So like when you're sitting down to to write and translate this stuff, yeah how how are you
Explaining Complex Science
00:27:51
Speaker
going about that? How are you the yeah the the translator for us?
00:27:56
Speaker
You know, I think with the edge of space time, so ironically, I was just saying all of this stuff about tenure. And this was the book that I wrote right after I got tenure. And so it's kind of like the aftermath of me like sitting around and being like, all right, I did it.
00:28:09
Speaker
But I also want to look at like, what are the things I left on the cutting room floor? Like, what are the big picture science questions that I felt like I had to leave behind in order to be professionally successful?
00:28:20
Speaker
So one piece of the edge of space time is that i just wanted to write a book that I was like, if you have physicist brain, this is what the world looks like to you. And I wanted to share that with readers, which is just like, you will, you know, about photons now, now, like whenever you're experiencing sunlight, like I'm looking at my window and I'm like, oh, look at all the photons and like the leaves are starting to come out and they're photosynthesizing photons. It's like literally just like what my brain process is.
00:28:48
Speaker
And I kind of just wanted to say like, you too can have this even if you never do like any of the like highly technical training that I did. There was also just a piece of like, my first love was literature.
00:29:00
Speaker
And so this is also me saying kind of saying here's a literary reading of the universe through physics. I think there's a way that you can read The Edge of Space Time as me just doing close reading for a few hundred pages. Like I'm close reading equations. I'm close reading Dirac. I'm close reading Hocking and Ellis. But it's all different versions of literary practice. I'm close reading Tracy K. Smith and Robert Frost and Natasha Trethewey.
00:29:29
Speaker
So I think there was also just a piece of like, actually, i really loved my English lit classes and like how can and and and just me being myself on the page.
00:29:39
Speaker
So it's interesting because I think the disordered cosmos, because a lot of people mistook it for a memoir, because I use personal essay as a form in it. And I talk about some of the in order to illuminate some of the challenges that we face socially and politically in physics. I use some of my own personal experiences to kind of lift up those problems. So I think a lot of people looked at that book and they were like, that was very vulnerable. But for me, The Edge of Space Time was the vulnerable book.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah. In what way was it more vulnerable? I mean, I think part of it was, what if people thought physicist brain sucks? There was really just this element of me putting myself on the page and kind of the random associations that my brain pulls together of like,
00:30:27
Speaker
yeah, somehow the Sankofa movie by Haile Garayama is relevant to why I think cosmology is important. And I do, I mean, Kiese Lehman blurbed the book and he said it was a politically audacious book. And at first I was like, whoa, strong statement. And then I was like, no, Kiese is absolutely right. It's politically audacious because like, I'm making a very strong claim about the role that Using physics and thinking with physics can play politically in our lives and in motivating the kinds of politics we choose and the way that we engage with the world politically. And I was also really pushing up a view of physics's role in society where capitalism isn't the thing that orients us towards what matters about physics. And
00:31:21
Speaker
I'm making a very strong claim, which was actually not originally part of the plan, but I'm making a very strong claim that physics is poetry in a way and that physics is in a way a literary
Physics as a Political Practice
00:31:32
Speaker
practice. And I think I feel like I came to that even more strongly after reading Anton Herr's incredible novel Toward Eternity.
00:31:40
Speaker
Which is where he really makes the claim. And he was reading Emily Dickinson. There's a lot of Dickinson in in the book. And he's basically saying that poetry is how we write the universe.
00:31:52
Speaker
And so then I was like, if I take that statement and make it literal, then I'm saying equations are poetry. And actually, maybe I don't disagree with that claim. So maybe that's not just like, you know, a very nice, you know, flowery statement that Anton came up with for toward eternity, but maybe that actually applies scientifically. So there was a lot of me just being like, here's like what I've been reading. Here's what I love.
00:32:21
Speaker
Here's how my brain processes. Like i think with Langston Hughes lines. So Langston Hughes keeps popping up in the subtitles of the books, right? There was just a lot of that for me that was very vulnerable because these are the things that matter most to me and I think are very are most core to who I am intellectually.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, well, and to the point of the politically audacious, yeah there of the many ah passages I highlighted, you here's one, like the philosophy of the edge of space time is that in order to move forward, we must always reach back to our past and use it as motivation and a guide. Human history is a matter of cosmic evolution, not just biology. Asking hard questions about the universe helps us get comfortable with being someone who asks hard questions, especially of those who want our votes, money and labor in return. And yeah that's just one passage that kind of speaks to that and echoes that.
00:33:12
Speaker
Definitely. You know, i think one of the hard things about writing, working on a long project is always that the world is happening while you're writing. And so the world that you make the book deal in is often not the world that the book emerges into. Yeah.
00:33:29
Speaker
And maybe that was a little more dramatic this time around. Right. Like I got the book deal in 2023 and then i am like in the middle of editing drafts two and three right as Donald Trump's second inauguration is happening. And literally every day it's a new disaster for science. Yeah.
00:33:49
Speaker
I went into it with a sense of urgency. i think another really ah a goal at the edge of space time was to propagandize my audience about why they want to live in a world where there's some small number of people who ask big picture questions about physics and about specifically about particle physics and cosmology, that that's actually part of a healthy democracy. And I mean that in the global sense, not in the nationalist sense. And that kind of took an urgent tenor when suddenly like The Trump administration was like, no, we're actually literally going to just shut science down. And I was like, oh, this isn't like a 20 year concern. This is like a two month concern. like So I think that was part of it. And then the other thing is that I was thinking a lot about like, OK, so how do I make the case to people that like this is.
00:34:39
Speaker
a mode of thinking that matters. And I think that's where the Robert Frost and Natasha Trethewey come in, where Trethewey was talking about being conscious of the abiding metaphors that shape how we think about the world from like our earliest memories and the stories that we were told as children.
00:34:56
Speaker
She invokes Robert Frost in this essay he wrote, Education by Poetry, where he is making this very strong, audacious political claim that if you don't understand the metaphor, then you don't understand the figurative. And he ends one section of this essay by saying that if you don't understand the metaphor, then you are not safe in science. You are not safe in history.
00:35:18
Speaker
And he's making this very strong claim that you can't understand the world you live in as a political space if you don't understand abstraction in language.
00:35:34
Speaker
And so and because he made this comment about science, I was like, well, wait, so what happens if we don't understand science? What happens if we don't engage in the kind of abstraction that physics does? And so a lot of the book is like this. Physics is a great playground for like thinking with the abstract.
00:35:53
Speaker
Questioning what constitutes normal, questioning your internal sensibilities about what's intuitive and what's not intuitive. And that is a great place to train your mind so that like you learn about non-tranary neutrinos. So there are three types of neutrinos. There three flavors.
00:36:10
Speaker
And as they travel through space and time, they randomly oscillate into one type or another. So an electron neutrino can become a tau neutrino and a muon neutrino as it as it travels around. So neutrinos are non trinary. And then you've got like these politicians being like, well, non binary people are not natural. And it's like, well.
00:36:30
Speaker
non-trenary particles are natural and neutrinos are also non-binary because they can be described as particles and as waves at the same time. So like, what do you mean when you say natural, right?
00:36:42
Speaker
and And that's not to say like that gender and sex are just like particles, but it is to say that like the metaphors that, that orient our sensibilities about naturalness can then shape like how we receive something like that Yeah, it's really well put. Yeah, and you also wrote, yeah speaking of the the moment you're writing the book in, like towards the end of the book, really, you're like, the moment I'm writing from is a fascist catastrophe. But if I look to the past, I see that my ancestors have faced fascist catastrophe before. How did they fight it? By any means necessary. With the boogie-woogie rumble. We must resist with the knowledge, with heart, with spirit, with creativity, with curiosity, and with a refusal to comply with our own destruction. Yeah. And I love that summation, but that that speaks to the political audacity, but it also speaks to the moment you're writing this book in.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yeah, that section was really interesting, right? Because I drafted it and then I kept having to tweak it as things happened. yeah and And so like i I actually so basically narrate that in the opening. like i was working on the first draft when this happened. i was working on the second draft when this happened.
00:37:52
Speaker
I'm crying in my now. I hope that you are not crying in the future. And i think one of the tensions that I'm always holding a socially engaged and community oriented theoretical physicist is that i love physics and I want to spread the gospel about how beautiful the cosmos is and how motion is weird. And these these things just matter in some absolute abstract sense.
00:38:23
Speaker
And also attend to the fact that it is perfectly reasonable for people to be like, but how can I think about that when Los Angeles is on fire?
00:38:34
Speaker
Right? Like I was working on the second draft. of I think it was the second draft of this book while Los Angeles was literally on fire last year. And I was in Santa Barbara. So I was just a couple of hours away and I'm from Los Angeles and was kind of having this weird experience of being like at this idyllic Institute for Theoretical Physics. And the ocean is like right next to the building and we're in these like really nice houses and the air is clean and the sky is blue. And it was just because like the wind was going north south that none of the smoke was coming up to us.
00:39:12
Speaker
from l la So I had to kind of hold the tension of I am not saying don't feel grief. I'm not saying that your grief isn't important or the things that you're grieving about shouldn't be central to like what you're thinking about or what your concerns are.
00:39:28
Speaker
But I'm also saying that the story of the cosmos can be part of not only how you deal with your grief by just having something that's beautiful, that's bigger than the bad things that are happening to us, as my mom, Margaret Prescott says,
00:39:46
Speaker
But also that this can orient you in the sense that I talk about Ben McKean's work in political science and political theory about disorienting neoliberalism.
Cosmic Perspectives on Capitalism
00:39:59
Speaker
That's the name of his book. And the idea that we have to choose how we orient ourselves politically speaking. And if we orient ourselves towards a cosmic perspective, then maybe we make a different choice in terms of like what we think the future can be and what we aim for from the future. and we need to orient ourselves away from accepting that the worst is definitive and that there is no other way of being in the world and that there is no way to get ourselves out of this. and maybe the cosmic can be one of the ways that you orient yourself toward, like as I say in the intro, the universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism. Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah, I highlighted that sentence. That was great. That was actually, you know, the funny thing, i guess speaking of k craft things, that's something that I randomly tweeted at some point. And then I was like, that's a good line. I'm keeping that. like ah yeah But I do think like, you know, you think about it and you're like, the universe is like vast.
00:41:02
Speaker
There's so many stars. We already know of over 5,000 planets outside of our solar system. Oh my goodness. There's almost certainly life somewhere out there besides on our planet.
00:41:15
Speaker
I don't think we'll ever have contact with it, but it's out there. And like, we are really supposed to believe that the best that the universe has to offer is like Jeff Bezos. Like, come on now. ah Anything like thinking with cosmic science kind of puts that in perspective. Like he's one little annoying human who has a finite lifetime from a very specific time period on one little planet and one like little solar system.
00:41:44
Speaker
That can't be the end all be all of like what's incredible about the universe. And I just think that like that helps me. Maybe it will help others. Yeah, and you kind of get to the the Fermi's paradox of it all, that if there's life out there, why haven't we seen it? But you and like you just said that, you know, there's probably life out there, but we're not going to see it. So what what it might be the fundamental reason why we don't make that contact?
00:42:09
Speaker
Or make contact made with us? The universe is really fucking big. Yeah. And I think like it can, it's it's so like the the length scales and time scales of like our everyday lives make it really hard to kind of like conceive of that. i actually really encourage people, there are various videos on YouTube that find different ways to kind of like give you a sense of like,
00:42:33
Speaker
what the length scales are when you get out into the cosmos. But even like the distance between the Earth and the sun is it takes like eight minutes for a light to get from the Earth to the sun.
00:42:47
Speaker
And that's like traveling at the fastest possible speed available in the universe. And it's very hard for anything else to travel at that speed. Non-tranary neutrinos do, but that's because like they're very low mass. They don't quite move at the speed of light, but they're very close or they can be very close. So we just simply have a distance and speed problem.
Extraterrestrial Life and Contact
00:43:10
Speaker
But I think that we have all the reason to to believe that i am there' there's probably life out there. And actually, there's a book coming out this summer by Savin Rasmussen.
00:43:21
Speaker
And what is it called? Is it Cloudy with a Chance of Life? I can't remember. It's like, it's a so a riff off of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the yeah the children's book.
00:43:33
Speaker
But it's actually exactly about this question of like how likely life is, what are the conditions that are needed? And i i do think that it's likely that it's out there, but we're probably not going to be hanging out with it anytime soon. And for those who have seen Project Hail Mary, there's a bunch of wishful thinking that goes on there about like how he manages to get to that star so quickly.
00:43:55
Speaker
A matter of ah some defining some terms and ah from the book that I suspect are pretty easy for you to define. um But ah can you can you run through you know what general relativity is, special relativity and in quantum mechanics?
Core Concepts in Physics
00:44:11
Speaker
I think in a lot of ways, it's easier to describe these. These are physical theories or models. They're physical models. And it's maybe easier to describe like what they do. So special relativity is was Einstein's first theory of relativity. And it helps us characterize how motion occurs when you take into account that the speed of light is finite and and unchanging.
00:44:39
Speaker
That sounds like it's like a very easy statement to make, like the speed of light, it's constant, it's finite. And it's very easy to make that statement. But actually, it has these really revolutionary implications for motion that you can no longer think of time as an absolute thing.
00:44:57
Speaker
And you can never think you can no longer think of space as an absolute thing. But actually, space and time have to be merged together in order to explain motion with this assumption about the speed of light. General relativity basically takes special relativity and adds into it gravity. And so general relativity is our best theory of gravity. And probably its most famous outcome is the idea that space time is curved and that space time can curve, right? So special relativity forces us into this world where we can no longer think of space and time as separate. And then general relativity says, and things like ripples in space-time can happen. So you can literally have a wave that travels across space-time. And gravitational waves are something I discuss in the book. This is something that we have both indirectly and now directly detected. Like we have a little detector that
00:45:48
Speaker
pointed at specific places where they thought gravitational waves might be coming from. And then a little thing vibrated with a gravitational wave as it like went through it, which is like so cool. And the LIGO experiment is this like a phenomenal thing.
00:46:02
Speaker
And then quantum physics or what we call quantum mechanics is really our theory of microscopic. um So like the subatomic matter on the smallest scale, so subatomic particles like electrons,
00:46:18
Speaker
i I always say electrons and protons and neutrons because like usually people like if you suffered through high school chemistry, I got a C in the first semester of high school chemistry, by the way. I just feel like people are always like, oh, but you guys are like so much. And I'm like, i i might ah you might have gotten a better grade than me in that class, just for the record. i am Electrons and are different from protons and neutrons because electrons are fundamental particles. So they are the most fundamental building block that exists in that type of matter.
00:46:50
Speaker
Whereas protons and neutrons are actually both made of another type of particle called a quark. And so they're actually composite particles. There are three quarks and a proton and three quarks and a neutron. And actually in the right physical conditions, you can convert a proton into a neutron by flipping one of the quarks.
00:47:07
Speaker
yeah so it's wild that those have spin like up and down spin too and that's like that's where my my brain just starts to go away it's just like oh my god there's there there are these things that even smaller than what we thought were the smallest things and now they got spin it's like what the hell's going on here i I was like, so people aren't going to see this, but I smiled really big when you brought up spin and accurately described what it is because I was like, yes. So while I was at this like retreat in Santa Barbara last year, i was sitting around at lunch and I was at this retreat. It was specifically for theoretical particle physicists.
00:47:45
Speaker
And we're at lunch one day and people are like, oh, so you're working on a book right now. And I'm like, yeah, that's what I've been doing in like my free time in the evenings. yeah And I'm like, I'm working on this chapter about the Stern-Gerlach experiment.
00:47:58
Speaker
Which fucked you up. Which fucked me up. ah And the entire table stops and they all look at me and they're like, what's wrong with you? Why why would why would you do that?
00:48:09
Speaker
And it's it's kind of this like unwritten rule that like you can't, the Stern-Gerlach experiment is too hard to explain to a general audience. And so do I feel like I did the best possible job of all time in the edge of space time? No, I'll probably like in five years be like, oh man, I could have like written that like so much better.
00:48:29
Speaker
But I really wanted to make the attempt and just put in front of people that there is this weird experiment that makes clear that particles have this property that mathematically looks like they are rotating, but they're not actually fucking rotating.
00:48:45
Speaker
So there's spinning without spinning. And we call this property spin. It's ah it's ah it's a quantum, it's a fundamentally quantum property. You know, I think sometimes people read that part of the book or read things like that. And they were like, oh, well, that definitely went over my head. And I'm like, because it feels weird and confusing.
00:49:05
Speaker
Welcome. That's actually like... when i teach it When I taught it to my graduate quantum mechanics class, like the first week, everybody was like, yeah, yeah, I saw this in my undergraduate class. And then like the second time I introduced it, they were like, okay, I need to know how to calculate with spin. And then the third time, I had a student who raised her hand, and she was like the best student in the class, and she was like, that outcome doesn't make any sense. And I was like, yes, that's correct. You are now starting to develop.
00:49:32
Speaker
Because that was the point at which she was realizing that her intuition needed to be dislodged. And that's the movement from receiving something as like, I'm just an authority and you just have to take it to the moment where you're like, okay, I now am starting to see why this is necessary on my own terms. Right.
00:49:54
Speaker
And now I feel offended because it doesn't make any fucking sense. And it's like, well, right. I actually want you to have the experience of being like, this doesn't make any sense because it's actually part of the process of developing a new intuition for things.
00:50:10
Speaker
I think part of like that particular experiment, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, is like such a gift because it does make you sit with your confusion. It does make you sit with, well, everything that I thought I knew about like what is normal in the universe, I kind of have to throw out. and It forces you to accept that on some fundamental level, the abstract is not just there to help us describe the universe, but that the universe almost has the abstract built into it physically. yeah And yeah that's odd.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah, and it the fact that like all this all this shit from the universe, it's like it just it is it's been there for billions upon billions of years, and it's like on us to try to, well, not us, but people like you, to create the the theory that helps explain it and other people to develop the the tools to experiment on it and the hardware to detect things. things that have been there forever, but now we need the framework to interpret it. And it's ah it's just it's wild. It's out there for the picking, but we just need to somehow tune our antenna and continually retune it as each generation each generation goes. it's It's wild, but it's it's out there. The answers are already out there. We just need the right translators and the right filters.
00:51:34
Speaker
I think that's exactly it. And there's an element of part of what I wanted to say to people is that like no matter what your everyday life is like, the universe is doing these things all the time. Like electrons have spin, which by I just have to say for the people who suffered through like the part of high school chemistry where like there were orbitals and you had to like figure out like the 2p and the 2s. Oh yeah, like the flower orbital and... Yes.
00:51:59
Speaker
So that's all determined by spin. That's all determined by spin and the fact that like the you can't put two electrons into the same state in the orbital at the same time. And so I just think actually if we taught quantum mechanics first, chemistry might be easier. i'm just goingnna I'm just going to throw that out there. But there is, like the universe has these properties built into it. And one of the things that I i maybe wish that I had written more overtly into the edge of space time, like more directly into the edge of space time,
00:52:34
Speaker
and we'll probably end up in the next book for science book for general audiences, is I talk a little bit in this book about how like motion is just kind of like a strange thing if you think about it, like the fact that motion happens at all. I have a chapter where I open with shit happens, right?
00:52:51
Speaker
And the question of why shit happens is actually like not a straightforward one. From the point of view of Einstein's theory of general relativity, you can mathematically write down a space-time where no motion happens, where like you just have this thing that has these properties and it's kind of like you just set down a stage and then no no production happens on the stage.
00:53:19
Speaker
And the thing that kind of adds the richness of production is that when you add quantum properties to that space time, then motion becomes inevitable because the moment that something has quantum that ah a space time has quantum properties, inevitably there's some energy in it and the energy is going to have particles flickering in and out of existence and sometimes they're going to stick around.
00:53:46
Speaker
And then some of those particles that stick around because ah their interaction with space time, they're causing space time to curve. And that's what we call gravitational attraction.
00:53:59
Speaker
And so sometimes those particles are attracted to each other. You attract enough of them. You get a gas, you attract enough of the gas, you start to get a proto star. You get that protostar that's hot enough and in close enough quarters that very occasionally an atomic nucleus is going to quantum tunnel and merge with another quantum nucleus or atomic nucleus. And those atomic nuclei emerging is nuclear fusion.
00:54:28
Speaker
And so then you have a star and the star is getting started. The star lives its lifetime, which is maybe 10 billion years in the process. It makes it converts hydrogen to helium. It makes carbon. It makes oxygen. It makes neon.
00:54:43
Speaker
it makes. Boron, it makes like all of these things. And then maybe at the end, it goes through like some very dramatic explosion. The process of that explosion, it makes iron, it makes nickel.
00:54:58
Speaker
It does all of these things. And then like the remnants of that start the process all over again. You have another star that forms, but maybe there's some leftovers and those leftovers form a planet and you have a planet with carbon and oxygen.
00:55:14
Speaker
and gold, which is, there's a little bit of a debate about how the gold is made, but also platinum. And that all starts because like you endowed the universe or the the universe somehow has these quantum properties.
00:55:29
Speaker
Motion becomes inevitable in that way. And like, look, I can just start with like, hey, you have quantum fluctuations and now you have earth. That's so fun. i just think that's really fun. Yeah.
00:55:41
Speaker
What would you identify as the the major tent poles in cosmology or physics physical discovery?
Unanswered Questions in Cosmology
00:55:52
Speaker
Well, so I guess like ah in terms of like what are the big picture questions right now that are kind of like driving us?
00:55:58
Speaker
You know, the interesting thing is, is that I'm a dark matter researcher and I don't spend a lot of time in this book on dark matter. And this kind of comes back to the earlier thing of like you're not supposed to write these books until you have like some big story that you want to tell about your own research. And I did not write this book because I wanted to talk about my research.
00:56:15
Speaker
I just wrote this book because I wanted to talk about shit that I thought was fun about the universe and about poetry and literature. And I also desperately wanted to make the case for why I shouldn't be the last generate part of the last generation of Americans that does particle physics and cosmology. And I think that we're actually really at risk that I will be among the last of my kind in the United States.
00:56:38
Speaker
And i think that would be a terrible outcome democratically, socially, politically, culturally. And but at the same I do think that I I talk a little bit about dark matters I should explain dark matter, we think is most of the normally gravitating matter in the universe. So it out numbers visible matter like stars or earth or people or trees or bees or whatever. That's all visible matter.
00:57:04
Speaker
Dark matter outnumbers it like five to one. So when you look up, like if you have the opportunity to be in a place where the sky is dark enough that you can see the Andromeda galaxy, i want you to imagine that the Andromeda galaxy is surrounded by like a bubble of dark matter when you're looking at it.
00:57:21
Speaker
That's what you should think when this is very much like a dark matter theorist perspective. But whenever you look at a galaxy, you should imagine a bubble of dark matter around it because almost every single galaxy has dark matter.
00:57:33
Speaker
And actually, theres there's like a whole fight going on right now in the community about the difference between like a star cluster and a very small galaxy. And there are some people who basically say it's a galaxy if it has dark matter and it's a star cluster if it doesn't have dark matter. There are other people who actually think that's like a terrible definition.
00:57:51
Speaker
So that's an example of kind of like the nerdy arguments that we're having with each other that are very much like social categorizations of where we should draw the line and make the cut. And there's like a linguistic element to it, which is like, what's our investment in naming something as a galaxy or naming something as a star cluster? Right. Right.
00:58:10
Speaker
So I would say i think dark matter, we know it's out there. We have no clue what particle it is. So like the way that I described to you, like the properties of the proton and the neutron, they're made of quarks or the way that I described to you the behavior of neutrinos I can't tell you any of that kind of information about the dark matter particle because we don't know what it is. So I would say that's one of the big open questions. And then the other thing is most of the energy matter content in the universe is something that we call dark energy.
00:58:40
Speaker
And it is causing the expansion of space time to pick up speed. So it's causing the expansion of space time to accelerate. There is a big fight in the community about whether we know why or not.
00:58:52
Speaker
i There are some people who feel like this is a solved issue, that it's just like it's a vacuum energy that comes out of, you know, if we were in a universe with a different value for the vacuum energy, like we wouldn't have evolved to exist. I talk in the book about how much I hate this resolution to the problem.
00:59:12
Speaker
But I will say i think those are the two big open problems in cosmology. I think like in particle physics, we're really trying to understand, we know that the standard model of particle physics can't be everything.
00:59:25
Speaker
It doesn't explain the mass of neutrinos. It doesn't explain why neutrinos are non-tranary. And it also doesn't explain dark matter. So I guess like, Dark matter wins because it's maybe the most important thing in particle physics and the most important thing in cosmology.
00:59:41
Speaker
And all right, ah kind of a fun a fun little thought experiment. So let's just say Newton and Einstein walk into a
Newton vs. Einstein Speculation
00:59:49
Speaker
bar. Who asked the first question and what are they what are they talking about? Oh, yeah. Okay, so Newton was an asshole. Yeah.
00:59:58
Speaker
yeah And Einstein kind of liked the ladies. So like but also, you know, Einstein was like very social justice oriented and Newton was like totally not.
01:00:12
Speaker
So like Newton was like invested in colonialism and enslavement. yeah And Einstein was actually committed to like race justice for black Americans once he was in the United States.
01:00:22
Speaker
So maybe they're arguing about like Newton's racism. I don't know actually like I don't know if they're talking about physics. It's possible they're talking about physics and in which case, you know, i think Einstein would be like so Isaac I read your principia and you make these very strong claims about absolute space and absolute time and you don't really back them up. So like what made you feel that you could make that kind of claim especially now that we all know you were very wrong.
01:00:53
Speaker
yeah It may be that I think Einstein would ask that question because that's the question that I have. Oh, I love it. That's great. um Well, let's let's see. where um yeah as yeah I bring these conversations down for a landing. I have so many notes. It would be so much fun to just hang out for another two or three hours. But alas, next book maybe. um I love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. It's just like anything you're finding fun and cool that you want
Book Recommendations and Discoveries
01:01:22
Speaker
to share with them. So I would extend that to you.
01:01:23
Speaker
You know, actually, I'm reading this book called The Boundless Deep, Young Tennyson Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes. And i will admit, i learned about this book at first because it is also a Pantheon book. Okay. But nobody at Pantheon asked me to talk about this. And I actually, i bought the hardcover with my own money. i didn't get a copy for free.
01:01:46
Speaker
And i am learning so much about Alfred Tennyson in this book and his childhood. And I learned about a woman science writer that I had never heard of like this morning while I was reading it.
01:02:00
Speaker
Tennyson as a child read a book by a science writer named Jane Marset. And she was friends with like the scientists and the science writers of the era.
01:02:13
Speaker
And she was one of the best selling science writers of the 19th century. And she wrote these books in dialogue forms. And she wrote one that was specifically aimed. it was about chemistry and it was specifically aimed at women readers. And she would write these dialogues between two women students, to two girl students and their woman teacher. And this is again, this is like 19th century England. So I will say, like, obviously, I'm very like I'm very interested by the story about Tennyson and the way that Tennyson was motivated by like new discoveries in astronomy during the 19th century in particular as a poet. And as like a very important like Victorian poet laureate during the Victorian era. But I have to say, like, I was just thrilled to to learn about Jane Marcet. And now I'm like, I she's she's going to appear in my next book for general audiences. That's for sure. There's no way that I'm not writing about her.
01:03:09
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. This was so great yeah just to talk to you about your your wonderful books and how how you go about thinking through it and translating it for ah the general audience among us. So just ah thank you so much for the time and the work at the work you're doing. And ah yeah, for carving out time to talk shop. This was wonderful.
01:03:27
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me on. I'm a fan. I'm a listener. So I really appreciate getting to participate. Thank you.
01:03:37
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks to Shonda and thanks to you for sticking around. We're in the after party. I've got some things like over in the corner to help you sober up.
01:03:48
Speaker
Free Wi-Fi, shuttle service you can get home safely. Yeah, be sure you're visiting the club. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. And if you can, leave kind reviews and ratings for the podcast and the front runner.
01:04:01
Speaker
All a form of payment that compounds annually. That's my understanding of economics. The front runner is actually getting a paperback run. I didn't think that was going to happen, but it is. And I was able to fix a few minor errors. Anyway, ratings, reviews, we need them.
01:04:17
Speaker
Since I don't shop at Amazon, I can't leave reviews there anymore. I used to do that as part of a the goodie bag for people leaving the podcast. And now ah these they used to get a five-star review from me, no matter what I truly thought of the book. um The lowest I'd ever really give a book, if I was being really honest, would be like a three. But that'd be rare. I mean, come on.
01:04:39
Speaker
Give us jabronis the five stars. ah They get the Goodreads review anyway. I don't think i need to buy anything to leave something there. So anyway, what is the click... with a CK, as I so meticulously teased in the introduction. As some of you know, the the bleeding of my book rejection won't stop. it It won't scar over. The blood won't clot, man.
01:05:03
Speaker
But what it's revealing to me is something I've known for years, but haven't quite mastered. It's doing enough research to get the pitch, the muscle it needs. And and certainly the overview of a book proposal is like the most muscled-up pitch in the world.
01:05:15
Speaker
I should know better. I really should. So I shouldn't be surprised at my recent rejections. theres There's always the balance of how much to do in that uncertain time between idea conception and the possible sale.
01:05:29
Speaker
It's all free labor at this point, and we don't want to waste our time doing too much on something that might not sell. But doing too little will guarantee it won't sell. I think we harbor this hope that we can Google around for a day or two and that'll be enough.
01:05:46
Speaker
It takes a long time for the shape to emerge, for it to either prove you right or prove you wrong, and that's where the click comes in. At some point, you hear a click.
01:05:57
Speaker
That satisfying sound when like two things lock together. In the case of a book proposal, it might take 25 to 30 hours on the phone with 25 to 30 different people. It might take the cataloging of hundreds of articles.
01:06:11
Speaker
The shape isn't always obvious, and the point of view might not emerge until you've got a better grasp of all that material. You might have to try different frames on for size, like, this one is weak, and what wow this one's better.
01:06:24
Speaker
and the dreaded, fuck, there's nothing here, is there? It's better to know so you can deliver on what you promise, right? But when you've done enough, you're going to hear the click, that you have something new to add, and that you're the only one to do it because ain't nobody doing that kind of legwork but you, right?
01:06:46
Speaker
Right? And you have to be honest with yourself. like Did you really hear the click? I don't think I did with this latest latest book proposal. I think i was just I was like a hopeful click. Like maybe it was just the that tinnitus ringing in my ears. And I was like, is there a click in there? I think so.
01:07:03
Speaker
I think I tricked myself into thinking it was there. Or it was too faint, and or it was just some half-hearted click. Kind of like you try to snap your fingers and it just like doesn't work. but Like my mom, like yeah she would she said she couldn't snap her fingers. It was just like that th flubbing of a finger. It doesn't matter. You know, it's almost like that research. I was looking for some, like, minimum effective dose that the Tim Ferriss's of the world espoused.
01:07:30
Speaker
Like, 212 degrees F. Boils water. No sense in raising it any higher unless you want to, like, nuke it into vapor. But I guess maybe it could be the click might be some sort of minimum effective dose of research.
01:07:46
Speaker
The perfect amount to get the chemical reaction roiling. State transfers or whatever. Oh no. I have steered this ocean liner into the sea of mixed metaphors. And the only way is to cut this mic. So stay wild, CNFers.
01:08:05
Speaker
Find the click. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.