sε wo werε fi na wosan kɔfa a, yεnkyi
it is not incorrect to go back and get what you forgot
Advertisement
—Akan proverb
We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?
Even so, I do. Science in this society is often done for the wrong reasons, I find myself telling them. And they remind me that because it’s my job to study the origin and evolution of the universe and everything inside it, I know there is a location in space-time where the universe became transparent to light: the first place where light could fly free. The ancestors insist: This is a story that I have learned so I could tell it to others. To do cosmology—to study the beginning and evolution of space, time, and matter—is to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history. To do cosmology is to go back and get the beginning, to map out the future.
So: Quite nearly at the beginning, the universe said let there be light. And particles of light—photons—all of them traveling at the speed of light, the fastest in the universe, couldn’t get very far. They were stuck in a plasma stew where they constantly bumped into particles, especially electrons, which swallowed their energy and spat it out in the form of new photons and other particles.
Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light for eighty-two years. It has been there almost since the beginning of everything and has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. It was there when the universe was cool enough for atoms to form. It was with the sun when it was just a cloud of gas, and it was there when the sun’s hydrogen ignited with fusion, turning the sun into a star. It was there when the leftovers from the gas cloud condensed into planet Earth. And it was there when carbon-based life forms evolved into apes.
This light is a cosmic edge: We cannot look past it because at any time earlier than that, the photons were trapped, unable to get out. And this edge is a reminder that physics is a way of gaining deep insight into the universe, one we can add to the variety of overlapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this boundary, and how we have come to know about it, is to deepen our relationship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it, for ourselves, and for future generations, because it is our history—and who are we to argue with the ancestors?
…
The book you are reading is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian Aimé Dafon Sègla calls cosmovisions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The Edge of Space-Time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz percussionist, artist, and technologist Milford Graves, who used percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed “cosmic energy.” Graves, a maker working in a long tradition of Black artists, was not formally trained as a scientist, and “cosmic energy” sounds a little like mystic talk. But when I listened to him describe his ideas in the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space-time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book.
As a set of knowledges and techniques, physics provides a pathway toward answering the same questions Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy, and space-time. It allows us to specify in great detail the relationship between photons and the plants in Graves’s garden which transformed the photons into living particles. It is another entry point to what plant biologist and Black feminist theorist of intersectionality in science Beronda L. Montgomery calls lessons from plants.
When it’s at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors—and a producer of metaphors in its own right. We often analyze the world through metaphor, and I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a perspective on the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us understand why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics. And if we cannot learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastrophe for the rest of us. That’s always been true, and it always will be.
In a world where genocides (plural) can be live-streamed and still continue unabated, it is hard to imagine that society could be otherwise when what is broken about it feels so total and, in the case of the families shattered and lives lost, so final. I don’t think cosmology by itself can save the world. Even so, I believe in the ways that people experience a connection to the cosmos as nourishing. And I believe in preparing for the better world that is coming.
This is an extract from by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books), the September read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .
When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.
