As someone who looks at the origin and evolution of spacetime, [laughs] no small thing, by the way, um, and everything inside of it, can you just start by, like, gently explaining how did our universe begin?

I guess I will say the easy and cheap answer is we don't know.

But we can talk a lot about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the formation of the universe.

So instead of-- Often people think like, oh, there was a Big Bang, and I think people imagine there was some explosion at some point, and then the universe came into existence.

And actually, like, I genuinely think that we don't know exactly what happens at that moment because whatever that was, it's where our equations break down, and so we don't have a good description of that.

But we know that, like, very soon, like, immediately after the universe came into existence or this iteration of it, that spacetime started expanding rapidly.

It happened really fast, in less than a fraction of a second.

Yeah.

[laughs]

... because the media coverage of it was so, um, stenographic.

Like, they weren't actually doing journalism.

They were just taking NASA press releases and then maybe explaining the things that they felt like NASA didn't explain enough in the press release.

But they weren't actually doing the work of...

Like, for example, I think most of us or a lot of us saw that incredible video of the Nutella flying across the, the screen in the background, which, like, I don't know what happened at Nutella headquarters, like whether they all just cheered for the incredible, like, cosmic advertisement, which was totally accidental.

And the way that it...

Hmm.

Yes.

So it appears in The Disordered Cosmos, which ends with Dreams Deferred.

It also appears in The Edge of Spacetime, which has the Cosmic Dream Boogie, and the name of this section of...

This is from a book-length poem called Montage of a Dream Deferred, and the name of this section is called Dream Boogie.

In it, Langston Hughes is talking about the beauty and the brilliance of the blues and also the grief and trauma that the blues emerge from and represent, particularly for Black life in the United States.

So the boogie-woogie rumble in particular, I think really in that line, he captures that feeling of there's great joy and brilliance and genius and, and noise and excitement, and also grief.

And I think in a lot of ways the...

And it appears to be taken as kind of the boundary at which our understanding of how the cosmos works sort of ends, except that maybe it's just that, that it's not a physical boundary so much as just our understanding, our ability to understand it doesn't quite extend far enough yet?

Yes.

So it appears in The Disordered Cosmos, which ends with dreams deferred.

It also appears in The Edge of Spacetime, which has the cosmic dream boogie.

And the name of this section of...

This is from a book-length poem called Montage of a Dream Deferred, and the name of this section is called Dream Boogie.

In it, Langston Hughes is talking about the beauty and the brilliance of the blues, and also the grief and trauma that the blues emerge from and represent, particularly for Black life in the United States.

So the boogie-woogie rumble in particular, I think really in that line he captures that feeling of there's great joy and brilliance and genius and, and noise and excitement, and also grief.

Except that maybe it's just that, that it's not a physical boundary so much as just our understanding, our ability to understand it doesn't quite extend far enough yet.

Can you talk to me a little bit about how you think about, you know, uh, the inclusivity of both your work and the universe itself?

Yeah, you know, I think with The Disordered Cosmos, that book was really both a love note to the cosmos and also, like, a very critical love note to the physics and astronomy communities about what's broken about how physics and astronomy are done and, and how that impacts people.

And so it's like a very holistic look at the doing of particle cosmology, right? And so I think there, talking about how our identity ends up as part of the story happened very naturally because that was actually part of the original plan of the book, was to talk about how the practice of science is shaped by identity and how people react to identity and, and what we would call ascribed identity, so race, gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation, like, all of these things.

One of the challenges I face is that The Disordered Cosmos was critically successful, which I really appreciate, and I particularly appreciate that I got readers who didn't usually pick up books about science and particularly didn't usually pick up books about physics and astronomy who were reading my book.

I wrote with Black readers in mind, and particularly Black women readers and Black and queer readers because I wanted to say we deserve to have books that are written with us in mind.

And in a way, I wrote to my 17-year-old self.

I read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, like, over and over in college, and that was one of the ways that in difficult moments I found, okay, there is meaning in this stuff even if I feel like I'm experiencing racism and sexism in the classroom.

I, um, all that being said, I would ask, as an American living in this time that we are in right now, h- how do you define patriotism today?

Yeah

... religious about my system that I use to, like, get book writing done.

Particularly, actually, while I was writing The Edge of Spacetime, I was also working on my third book, which I'm still...

I have a first draft of, and I'm now cleaning up, The Cosmos as a Black Aesthetic.

And so there is this element of particularly The Edge of Spacetime and The Cosmos as a Black Aesthetic I think of as a pair of books, and so there is some conceptual overlap between the two.

But there are also some differences, and The Cosmos as a Black Aesthetic is being published on an academic press.

And so there's also this element of needing to keep my citations straight, particularly for the academic book, where citation and referencing will be very important.

Yeah.

I'd be curious if you could unpack it.

Yeah, you know, it can be hard to talk about this at this point because I always want to tell people that me introducing the term white empiricism led to lots of people providing evidence for its existence.

It's become this very interesting feedback loop.

So I started reading a lot of feminist philosophy of science and an interesting thing about it is that they would often talk about how the social and the political can shape what we know about things.

And even the stories that we tell, I think a very famous example within science, technology and society circles is for example, thinking of the sperm as attacking the egg and how this kind of genders the sperm and genders the egg and particular narratives about like what a man does and what a woman does.

And how if we didn't think in those terms that we might understand the dynamic between sperm and egg differently.

So this is like an example of how the gendered metaphor that we use kind of shapes our way of thinking about the scientific process and the actual thing that's happening.

In your words, what do you think? uh they could they could get from from this book

Yes

... for the academic book, where citation and referencing will be very important.

I think on a deeper level, there's a piece of this that, you know, I consider myself to be working in the Black radical tradition and in the Black feminist tradition.

And within the Black feminist tradition, citation is very important.

And so it's very important when an idea that someone else has come up with is part of how you're thinking and part of what creates your thought, that you should cite that idea.

And so as an example, in the book I talk about how the fact that wave-particle duality is a thing, and so particles are also waves, and this, this idea, the British Iraqi drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi was the first person that I heard say this on-

Yeah

...

Mm

... from that perspective.

And so there's a lot of like me just opening my brain and saying, "Wander around and see what it's like." And so you get the kind of associations that I have, so you get me mentioning Tracy K.

Smith's poem, "The Universe Is a House Party," because I think that that's a really beautiful metaphor, and it makes sense to me and it makes sense in, in terms of like the way that I think about what I do in, in particle physics and cosmology.

Um, both, both of my books have references to the same Langston Hughes poem in the subtitle.

So this one, The Edge of Spacetime: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, and the first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

So Dream Boogie and Dreams Deferred both come from the opening part of Langston Hughes' book-length poem, "Montage of a Dream Deferred." And so there's a lot of like just word association and, and trying to construct for people the narrative pathways that exist in my brain.

Right

Yeah

... to do with her mother and her father, and like the fact that like none of them knew how to relate in, in, in a healthy, in, in a healthy way.

I will say the part where Maria is like, "Don't go.

Let's both leave our spouses.

And also let's get a hotel together, but also we're not gonna have sex, but we are gonna sleep together and make this plan to break up," I just thought, I mean, obviously, you know as the reader this is a tragedy.

This is like-

I thought so too, or like a miscarriage or something.

Right.

[laughs]

And so, like, in connection to that, I, I showed an early interest, and once I learned the times tables, I just loved them.

But for me, it was, like, very connected to...

I had the experience of learning that within a family where it was books and math, so there was never any of this feeling of these are two separate worlds and they shall never meet or anything like that.

And then I, I kept showing interest in this.

I got really excited about physical science and a little elective my school was offering when I was 10, and my teacher was like... told my mom, who was the, the main custodial parent, "You have to give her more enrichment.

Take her...

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

And it is this beautiful queer love story that was almost quite disastrously actually, like, another kind of trope of queer death.

And luckily, some people talk some sense into the production and writer's room so that it doesn't end that way.

But there is this moment where, spoiler alert, Culber is trapped in these small extra dimensions, and Wilson Cruz being stuck in those extra dimensions is so emotionally powerful.

And it was interesting for me to kind of learn about, I guess, like, being in my own head of when I envision, when I'm thinking about what are these small extra dimensions like, that that was the storyline that came to mind.

And I think a lot of the work that we do in science communicating and science writing is trying to figure out how we can take something that's familiar to the reader and use it to guide the reader to something that maybe is less familiar to them.

And it was so much fun to have the option to take these storylines that have been very culturally important to me as a queer person and as a Black person and put them into conversation with these scientific ideas that are really powerful for me as a physicist, and Wilson Cruz's performance brought all of those things together for me.

And then, two, tell me how an experiment could have ruined you [laughs] in this way.

I mean, yeah, that is the better way to say it, [laughs] but it's like, it feels so wrong.

It feels wrong, and it's not what we were taught, right? We're, we're...

Gravity is the first force that we ever meet in, in a physics education, and it's the one that we consciously live with in everyday life.

So on, on a level in terms of thinking about this question of what happens when you try and put quantum into conversation with gravity, these are two different frameworks that are trying to solve two different problems, and then you're saying, "Well, what if I think about the problem together?" So for example, I wanna understand the structure of space time at the microscopic particle-like scale.

And then you run into some serious mathematical difficulty because the question is, is space time, does it have gaps? What does it...

What, what would that mean? How do we write down the math for it? And there's really a whole universe out there of, of ways that people are thinking about the quantum gravity problem.

But I do think it can be helpful to understand that maybe framing them through the metaphor of a clash or a war is not the right way to do it because they're not fighting with each other.

Why do you think this is so important to, to really spend this time figuring out what we don't know?