Review of The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Why do you read a popular science book about physics? If, like me, your goal is to expand your mind, then The Edge of Space-Time will achieve that goal several times over. I love reading a good physics book. Every time I read a different scientist’s explanations of Lorentz invariance or the standard model, I get just a little bit closer to understanding (as much as a layperson can get close to understanding) what this is all about. But what makes Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s second book so special is that it’s expansive in more than one dimension. As its subtitle implies, this is an intertextual dream boogie, one that will have you thinking as much about literature as leptons.

I can’t believe it has been nearly four years since I reviewed The Disordered Cosmos, Prescod-Weinstein’s first book. So much has changed in our world since then—yet it also feels like so little has, a theme reflected in this book’s closing chapter, “Go Back and Get It,” with a letter addressed to the future. It’s a letter acknowledging the bleakness of the present moment while placing it within its proper context of all the terrible moments past and an appeal to intertwining power of political, scientific, and artistic resistance. It is a very powerful conclusion to an equally powerful book, but I suppose I should go back to the beginning.

To call The Edge of Space-Time merely a physics book is a disservice, for it is far more than that. It is a truly interdisciplinary journey, one that draws on science, yes, but also history and literature and art and media. It’s queer. It’s metaphor. It’s lucid yet dreamy. As much as it is an inheritor of and response to classic physics books like the one from which it takes its title, this book is also an inheritor of literary works.

Prescod-Weinstein is a nerd nerd. Star Trek (particularly Discovery) and Alice in Wonderland are baked into this book’s DNA, along with media I’m personally less familiar with like the 1993 film Sankofa. Prescod-Weinstein doesn’t just casually allude to these titles but rather weaves her entire conversation about physics around them, embedding them deeply and purposefully into the work.

This approach really speaks to me personally. I’m trained as a mathematician and a teacher with a double minor in English and philosophy; I’m qualified to teach both math and English in high school. When someone inevitably asks m which subject I prefer, I can’t give them a simple answer. I love them both, and I don’t view them as being so far apart as most students are brought up to believe. So Prescod-Weinstein’s approach makes perfect sense. Yet it is still quite revelatory, for it’s only in reading this approach that I realize how … incomplete … most other physics books feel.

See, science communicators, in an effort to make their books accessible, tend to approach topics very carefully—famously, of course, Hawking remarks in A Brief History of Time that he restricted himself to a single equation in the entire book for fear of how more math would hurt sales. But even the most lucid and salient of these books often feels incomplete to me, for they set physics apart from other human endeavours (and often other sciences, even). That isn’t the case here, where Prescod-Weinstein recognizes from page 1 that her role is our guide, an interpreter, a storyteller, in a way far more consciously steeped in literary allusion.

Yes, The Edge of Space-Time is accessible in the sense that it is not math heavy. You won’t be bombarded with equations and want to run for the hills. Moreover, Prescod-Weinstein is very reassuring in how she explains the thorniest parts of the book, such as the Stern–Gerlach experiment (which I don’t recall ever hearing about in a popular science text before!). I love how she says, “For those who just want to coast, I’ll flag for you when we’ve come to an important conclusion.” It’s inclusive and welcoming—yet at the same time, she then dives right in with diagrams and explanations, challenging us if we want that challenge.

(As an additional aside, I just want to say I love her explanation of what spin means in the quantum sense. Ever since I realized particles are not actually physical, spinning objects like we’re initially taught in school, the concept of spin hasn’t made sense to me. The way she links spin to angular momentum was so clear it now feels incredibly obvious.)

Beyond the purely scientific discourse, however, this book is accessible through its layers of intertextuality. As you read, you might find yourself forgetting you’ve picked up an introductory physics text and instead wonder if you’ve wandered into an interdisciplinary literature course. Barely a page can go by without Prescod-Weinstein mentioning another book, movie, TV show, or song. I’m walking away from this experience with hella reading, viewing, and listening recommendations, something I wasn’t expecting, and I love it. The Edge of Space-Time doesn’t just challenge you to think deeply about the universe and our place therein: it’s saying one cannot do that without also considering how humans have been doing this for millennia through storytelling and art.

Time and again, the phrase “in conversation with” leaps off the page, as Prescod-Weinstein puts a physics concept in conversation with not just other physics ideas but cultural and literary works too. And this is the beating heart of the syncretic nature of this book, a rebuff of the clinical and sanitized version of science canonized by Great Men in white lab coats. Prescod-Weinstein makes the point here that the dreamers are scientists too. The ancestors were scientists. The artists are scientists. Science is not something reserved for the chalkboard (or whiteboard) and lab; it’s something we humans have done for as long as we can remember. Science is culture. This is profound, for it charts the shape of science’s failure modes—as she pointed out in The Disordered Cosmos and echoes here, modern science as it manifests in academia is profoundly hostile towards women and people of colour because science is not exempt from white supremacist and capitalist bullshit. It also charts the edges of science itself and demonstrates the necessity for science as a pursuit to be in conversation with art (and vice versa).

The moment this really hit me as I was reading was in Chapter 9, “TRAP Phenomenology.” Prescod-Weinstein shares how a 2021 paper got her questioning, “Are the boundaries we imagine for classical physics simply failures of imagination?” This is such an excellent question from both science and philosophy of science perspectives. I really appreciated this moment of vulnerability (among many) from her, along with her careful consideration of this idea. The way she models scientific inquiry and thinking on the page is no small feat.

I want to close with one more quotation that sits with me. The penultimate chapter, “You Are Not Safe in Science,” opens with this:

Halfway through Space Is the Place, Sun Ra muses that scientists are fed on research while Black people have been fed on freedom. As a Black physicist, I have been fed on both, and I have tried to grow the seeds that my ancestors passed on to me. The ancestors could fly. I do too, whenever I am able to escape into looking at the universe through the lens of quantum fields.

Honestly? Raising the bar for the quality of prose I expect from all my physics reads going forward. This is why I read books—and not just physics books. Any book. This. The way Prescod-Weinstein reaches across the span between us to talk to me about the stars we both look up at and so generously offer what she knows. The consonance of her prose and the clarity of her explanations and the commitment to using language to resist and rise. The Edge of Space-Time is special. It made me think far beyond the stars central to its tale, and it carries a narrative about science as a flawed human endeavour in conversation with art and politics that I think more of us need to hear. In the face of all that we’re going through in our present time, this book has left me energized and excited for the work ahead.