Book Reviewed: The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Rethinking racism from a physicist’s perspective There is not much to learn about cosmology or theoretical physics from this book. The author represents a breed of physicists who specialize in particle physics, and also teaches in Women and Gender studies Program. Her vision is nontraditional in that she focuses on Black racism and challenges of a queer feminist in a book with a physics title. Some chapters have nonconventional titles like; Dark Matter Isn't Dark, The Physics of Melanin, and Rape Is Part of This Scientific Story. She argues against the analogy that compares dark matter to Black people, when in fact, dark matter in physics narrative is invisible, and no physicist ever made such comparison. She is especially critical od racism in cosmology. She is partly correct in that there was always intellectual colonialism and dismissal of scientific work in non-European countries. In one chapter she affirms, “We're here, we're queer, and like quantum mechanics, we're not going anywhere.” The author seems to follow the same path as Karen Barad, another theoretical physicist who teaches in Women Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She proposes that the human condition, be it a gender bias or queerphobia, emerge from fundamental physics. The phenomena or objects emerge through interactions of wave-particles that explains how quantum reality is manifested by human interactions. In essence race/gender-based discrimination originate from quantum mechanics. I am confounded by the fact that the author seems to relate the state of human condition to particle physics. This is far-fetched since human behavior is related to evolutionary scheme. First, we know that the biological evolution is un-predictable, and it has its own growing and subtends to economically possible solutions it is presented with by nature. In this respect living beings operates like the economic web, which is also un-predictable but grows with economic opportunities. There are parallels between biological evolution, evolution of the economy, society, climate, and even political systems. Racism, gender-bias and queerphobia may be traced to these facts where the laws of physics or the framework matter does not change but only life changes when challenged by social and economic parameters. The author is born to a white Jewish father, and her criticism of racism in science is rather excessive.