I was not looking for this book. I rarely buy anything on Amazon, but I do use it frequently as a search tool. Bezos doesn’t need any of my money…he has more than enough without the meager amount my book buying habit could send his way. I use the library, rarely buying more than a few books anymore in a year. “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime & Dreams Deferred”, turned out to be a valuable surprise. I’m always searching for books that crossover between physics and biology, that examine that complex academic space between the too often clearly demarcated, and isolated, sciences, books that address the question of, ‘What is life?’. This isn’t one of those, but it is about physics, how we do it, how the world we live in colors it and how those ‘physics’ are used to shape the world we all live in. I found this book, in that space labelled, ‘Customers who viewed this item also viewed’. It was not what I expected.
The author, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, decided to be a particle physicist when she was ten years old. She was a precocious child who loved math and the physics of the quantum level universe, from an early age. I know, weird. She would talk to her fellow students on the bus about quarks and such. The fact that she succeeded in her professional quest, at least so far, is remarkable given the circumstances of her birth, her family economics, being the daughter of a Black Caribbean mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father, growing up in a mixed Latino neighborhood of East LA. Add to this that she was primarily raised by her single parent mother who was a social activist, suffered a life changing accident when hit by a car while riding a bicycle, identifies as agender while presenting as femme and was raped by a professor in her department. That’s a lot of hurdles to overcome. Continue reading
I mostly read non-fiction, books on history, the ‘natural sciences’, about life. I get my fiction in the form of television and movies, graphic novels and no, there is a lot more out there other than the limited, repetitive genre of super-heroes from the DC and Marvel universes. I’m drawn to the speculative stories, alternative tellings of this world, of life lessons, attempts to reimagine the past, or invent possible futures, stories that question what we are generally taught in this life. But really, I’m a science guy, reading those authors who draw from the leading edge of science, and the scientists themselves, who are skilled enough communicators, not something that necessarily is companion to those ‘doing’ science, those who can clearly discuss what they’ve learned and present reviews of entire fields of study, which strive to show the reader how our understanding of the world is changed.
David Graber, an anthropologist, and David Wengrow’s, an archeologist, book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is more than ‘just’ a history of humanity, which would on its own suggest a massive tome of thousands of pages. it is an examination of how we ‘do’ history drawing many examples of peoples and societies across time from the Paleolithic through the colonization of North America. It is not simple reportage, rather a look into the correctness or accuracy, of how we have been telling history. I enjoy such questions and their capacity to rock the academic and intellectual ‘boat’. My reading has spurred the formation of links to two other books I’ve read recently, Stephen Jay Gould’s, “The Burgess Shale” and Pekka Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent”. All three of these call into question previously widely accepted thinking on their subjects. More than this, they question foundational ideas upon which the science they examine are founded. This appeals to me. But more than this, there is an idea central to them all which really rings ‘true’ for me. 
We live today in a very divided and polarized world. You can take almost any characteristic used to define a group of people today and it is now being used to separate and divide. We do this sometimes out of pride, others, out of fear and desperation. We thus define our individuality, or our ‘people’, in a process of reduction, eliminating variation and possibility. This is who I am. This is my world, the world that matters. When we do this our world shrinks. That outside of it, becomes a threat and ‘threats’ proliferate. The causes of our problems are commonly reduced to ‘them’. Most of the divisions are, however inconsequential. Having been pried open we find ourselves separated by seemingly giant rifts, animosities greatly exaggerating the actual differences. Too many ‘leaders’, in bids to gain power themselves and cement their own advantage, beat the drums of division, gaining followers, customers and believers to their cause…which is often something very different than what they may publicly say. A world built on such differences is a precarious one, as groups strive for security by focusing on the differences rather than on the infinitely more common shared links which join us. This country was, in many ways, built on such differences. 
GardenRiots 