Prescod-Weinstein's research is complicated. That said, she has a gift for analogy and clear writing that makes the concepts she deals with as accessible as possible. Much of Prescod-Weinstein's work is related to "Dark Matter". This is the mysterious substance that dominates our universe yet is invisible to our detectors. We can infer its existence from experimental measurements and from the complex equations that Prescod-Weinstein loves (though she is careful to only include one of these in the book!). In her explanation of her own work, and the "disordered cosmos" we live in, she begins with the smallest particles and their components, building up and linking these to the enormous structures of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that dominate the galaxy we can see. It is fascinating and Prescod-Weinstein is a brilliant communicator and tackles some amazing science.
But as she explains the science, Prescod-Weinstein also does two other things. She constructs useful metaphors that allow her to explain wider, political issues and tackles the way that capitalism shapes the very framework that scientists use to understand the world. Let's look at a good example of this. Prescod-Weinstein says:
Newton's conception of objects moving in space relied intensely on Euclidean geometry as an organising framework. I a sense, students are still introduced to calculus through this lens... Almost everything in my education about space eventually came back to Euclidean geometry, because it was supposedly intuitive.
But she continues,
The Palikur people of the Amazon see it rather differently. Their geometric system, which more accurately describes the movement of stars across the night sky than the Euclidean one, is what we would call 'curvilinear.' Understanding stars moving across the sky requires a king of intuition for curves - something that's hard to gain when you're always thinking in Euclidean terms. The Palikur system seems to train the mind to think in terms of curves from the very start.
This, is an important insight. The intellectual framework we have for understanding science arises out of a particular time and space - the European enlightenment. This was, as Prescod-Weinstein says, then imposed on the rest of the world through an ongoing process of imperialism and settler-colonialism. So our science is closely tied up with the interests of the capitalist system.
Prescod-Weinstein points out that even a subject as seemingly scientifically "pure" as astronomy is tainted by its role in this process. She highlights the recent debates over a new telescope on Mauna Kea were administrators and scientists dismissed indigenous communities concerns. European astronomy expeditions needed the labour of slaves and indigenous people and their findings helped spread the capitalist system around the globe. Those astronomers and scientists who would dismiss the close links between astronomy and the interests of capital might like to note that the first thing a visitor sees when arriving at the Greenwich Observatory in London is not the brass meridian line, but a set of "Imperial Standards of Length" crucial to the organisation of global commerce. The meridian line itself carves up the world based on a line drawn through the capital of the British Empire. Time itself was transformed by capitalism, as EP Thompson famously wrote about in his article Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.
Our intellectual frameworks then arise out of the dominant economic and political interests of the system we live in - and this has shaped even the science that Prescod-Weinstein studies. The use of colour names as analogies in particles physics is problematic, and Quantum Chromodynamics was originally (and sometimes still is) called "colored physics". A name that would not have been used, as Precod-Weinstein points out, had Black people not been "excluded" from particle physics in the 1960s. The language of physics is "a hot mess".
Which brings me to one of the key points of this book - racism. Physics, Prescod-Weinstein points out, has a racism problem. Part of that is something that she calls "white empiricisms", this is
a practice of ignoring information about the real world that isn't considered to be valuable or specifically important to the physics community at large, which is oriented toward valuing the ideas and data that are produced by white men... I developed this argument by using the specific example of how Black women are treated in the scientific workplace and juxtaposing it against a debate about whether actual observations and experiments are necessary to support theories of quantum gravity. Black women are constantly asked to provide hard evidence for our evaluations of our most common place experiences with discrimination, et white men are taken seriously when they suggest that more affirming data isn't necessary in order to test their theories of quantum gravity.
Physics is a subject that has been built upon racist structures and individual actions of racism and colonialism. As James Poskett has recently pointed out, Isaac Newton had enormous investments in the South Sea Company, which in turn made massive profits from the slave trade. Prescod-Weinstein shows how indigenous people, slaves and servants had their knowledge and labour stolen and used by white-male scientists who claimed it as their own. The scientific establishment has developed on a structural racism that has deep historic roots - both systemically in terms of the history of capitalism and institutionally in terms of the history of the science itself.
The problems with structural racism, and misogyny that Prescod-Weinstein documents, mean that physics is not a welcoming space for people who don't fit the white-male norm. Prescod-Weinstein gives us the unpleasant statistics. But she also tells us her experiences - the racism, the sexism, transphobia and homophobia and the difficulties that students who come from lower income backgrounds (something that is much more common for Black students) experience arriving in an academic environment that is shaped by the interests of better off white people. I suspect this is true of other sciences too, but Prescod-Weinstein argues it is particularly a problem in physics. She also highlights that trans and nonbinary people in physics are "particularly harmed by gender discrimination, including by advisers and colleagues who refuse to use people's correct pronouns". Too often the institutions say that its "too difficult" to learn how to do this. To which Prescod-Weinstein rages:
First-year college physics students are expected in just one semester to not only memorize Newton's laws of physics but also to learn how to apply them. If we can have the lofty expectations that our students will master the basics of gravity - a deeply mysterious force that pervades the entire universe - then surely they are owed mastery by their professors and classmates of a couple of letters that get their pronouns right.
So Prescod-Weinstein is under no illusions that more training in "microaggressions" or "antiracism" is enough to solve this problem. Nor is simply increasing the number of black or LGBT+ students. As she says, "My personal success will not end the structural racism that keeps so many Black people and refugees, especially single mothers, their children, and trans folks in poverty."
Instead what is needed is the destruction of a system that is based on oppression and exploitation. Prescod-Weinstein is very clear that the systemic and structural problems that she outlines are the consequence of centuries of colonial and imperialist rule, and are integral to capitalism. They distort science, and they distort scientists and they make it harder to practice science. As such the system needs to go.
Prescod-Weinstein's book is a powerful, beautifully written study of science and society. It is, at times, a difficult read, because the subject matter includes racism, sexism, transphobia, sexual abuse and rape. Towards the end of the book she writes that as a teenager she believed "that if we solved the fundamental equations of physics, the rest of the proper order of the universe could be derived". This chimed with my own experiences studying mathematics and physics at university. As a white, heterosexual male I certainly do not claim that I can share her experiences of oppression. But I did have a naïve belief in "pure science" that I thought would fix the world. Finding that this was not the case was one of the reasons I became a socialist activist.
In reading The Disordered Cosmos I was reminded however that science, and education, do matter in and of themselves and that we want more people to enjoy them. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's book is filled with her enthusiasm for the universe, as much as it is filled with a rage against a system that denies this to so many people. As she concludes, "We must demand liberation for all, including the right to know and understand the night sky, not as the context of desperate and generous searches for freedom, but as the beautiful place that holds the answers to how we came to exist at all."
Related Reviews
Richardson - Say it Loud! Marxism & the Fight Against Racism
Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science
Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Miller - Empire of the Stars: Chandra, Eddington and the Quest for Blackholes
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