Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

A luminary and necessary journey. This book may start with how the cosmos appears to work, but more importantly, it expands into a guide and call for how we should restructure our way in the cosmos. Prescod-Weinstein shares with unflinching clarity how Black and Indigenous feminist theory not only applies to the science of astro/physics, but is indeed necessary for its ethical future. I found it deeply inspiring, while devastatingly realistic, and that is rare to find.

P.S. Fair warning, the physics section in first 1/4 of book moves fast! But at least not with a density in equations.

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

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collins1129's review

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informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

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4erepawko's review

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

“People need to know that we live in a universe that is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us.”
- Margaret Prescod

The book weaves together a memoir and a science non-fiction genre in focusing not only / not as much on physics as just physics, but on Chanda’s own scientific story and journey into discovering physics. In the process, it covers topics from the universe itself, it's composition and our place in it to colonial history and present of science as well as its military and capitalist sponsorship. The book raises important questions such as who gets to be a scientist, how the often invisible gendered labour has always made the science possible in the first place, or how rape and sexual assault can be a part of a scientific story and how to reckon with that.

Overall, it takes a look at physics as an inherently human process, and at our attempts to figure out the universe as humans. One of the best reads for me this year & I highly recommend it to everyone, especially those interested in physics, science, and/or social justice, feminism, and racial politics.

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