Disordered Cosmos

My first love was physics. As a teenager I used my newfound ability to access torrents to amass a collection of physics and mathematics textbooks, including a complete collection of the Feynman lectures. I demanded my grandmother drag me to the science museum every time my mom dropped me off at her home. I spent my high school years wishing I were smart enough to attend the, what I considered “cool”, science and math magnet school. I went off to college with the intention of majoring in physics, but when I informed my grandmother of my plans she shot me a concerned look and inquired “and what does one /do/ with that?”

In my story growing up in a family that fled domestic violence and endured years of stalking and surveillance, it had been grilled into me that the path out of poverty was to go to college and make something of myself. Physics was not an option. That was for people whose entirely livelihoods didn’t depend on their ability to land a job immediately after college.

So while physics was my first love, I felt right at home in my engineering degree. But I wasn’t just at any engineering school. I specifically chose a liberal arts historical womens college to pursue engineering. I wanted to surround myself with anthropologists and history majors, with people who could expose me to different ideas and world views. I had no intention of being “one of those” STEM folk who couldn’t form a sentence or relate to other folk.

I spent 4 years earning my engineering degree. Along the way I sat in lectures that insisted upon us the moral obligations of engineers to “do good”, that ethics and morals are intrinsic aspects of engineering, and how we cannot divorce the scientific act of engineering from the social, cultural, and economic landscapes of our work.

And then I watched all my peers take jobs at companies that made bombs. I wondered, “were we in the same classes? did they not get the same lessons I did?”

That brings me to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book. In it, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein details her love of particle physics, recounts her journey to becoming a Black woman physics professor, and shared with us a delightful treasure of thoughts ranging from the intersection of fascism and science to a takedown of the gender binary.

I abandoned my engineering career one year out of college after enduring a year of bullying, sexism, and classism in a consecrating civil engineering firm. Reading this book lit a flame in me that had long been extinguished. The book starts with a damn nerdy and technical description of how the universe works, and I remembered that I used to devour this stuff for fun once upon a time. The book goes on to offer an intellectual gauntlet of critical analyses covering everything from physics, feminism, race, politics, colonialism, fascism, identity politics, rape culture, gender, class, and more than I could do justice.

This is the book I wish I had read as an engineering student in college. It’s the book I wish I could make my old college classmates read (which may be better than grabbing them by shoulders to demand how they could possibly help fuel the industrial-war complex after all that we were taught in college). It’s the nerdy, technical, thoughtful, feminist gift that would have scratched the right itch for me all those years ago. Maybe I’d still be an engineer if I had this book 10 years ago.