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tovac 's review for:
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
"Physics is not the universe. Rather, it is one very human attempt to get at its innards."
I found this author's perspective to be refreshing and necessary because I am long fed up with the predominantly male narrative of science being absolute and infallible.
I will admit I really struggled with Part 1 of this book for ages (because physics is and always has been very hard for my brain to compute, despite my being interested in it) but also I appreciated the challenge it presented for me. My main takeaway from Part 1, summed up, is:
So much of what this author is explaining seems to boil down to "we are trying our best and have some really solid evidence based theories we can comfortably rely on but also none of them really seem to make absolutely everything fit together well and also a lot of it is arbitrary"
The rest of the book is where things really started to click for me. I've come away from this book with both reaffirmed and new knowledge and don't know how to do it justice other than to include some quoted text that stuck out the most to me:
"A curious feature of enlightened Europe was that their obsession with conquering everything was in tension with a desire to know how things worked: so how things worked had to be consistent with justifying abominable behaviour."
"As the Enlightenment witnessed a transfer of power away from the church to science, science became the new foundation that racists used to argue that Blacks lived in the conditions they did - not because of any moral failings on the part of the perpetrators of slavery - but because it was the logical, natural order of things."
"The tradition of racism among white scientists is perhaps not surprising when we recognize that science and society co-construct one another..."
"Although openly eugenicist ideas are considered to be somewhat fringe, it is still clear from anthropological studies of science that the biology of the disempowered - such as people with XX chromosomes (often identified as women) of any race - is less likely to be studied."
"No one ever looks at a persistent correlation in science and says "that's just a coincidence!" But so often scientists refuse to acknowledge persistent correlations around racism in science."
"Standpoint theory - the idea that someone's particular social position can give unique insight into phenomena, insights others with different social positions would miss."
"I've grown up, and I know now that science is inextricably tied to power."
I found this author's perspective to be refreshing and necessary because I am long fed up with the predominantly male narrative of science being absolute and infallible.
I will admit I really struggled with Part 1 of this book for ages (because physics is and always has been very hard for my brain to compute, despite my being interested in it) but also I appreciated the challenge it presented for me. My main takeaway from Part 1, summed up, is:
So much of what this author is explaining seems to boil down to "we are trying our best and have some really solid evidence based theories we can comfortably rely on but also none of them really seem to make absolutely everything fit together well and also a lot of it is arbitrary"
The rest of the book is where things really started to click for me. I've come away from this book with both reaffirmed and new knowledge and don't know how to do it justice other than to include some quoted text that stuck out the most to me:
"A curious feature of enlightened Europe was that their obsession with conquering everything was in tension with a desire to know how things worked: so how things worked had to be consistent with justifying abominable behaviour."
"As the Enlightenment witnessed a transfer of power away from the church to science, science became the new foundation that racists used to argue that Blacks lived in the conditions they did - not because of any moral failings on the part of the perpetrators of slavery - but because it was the logical, natural order of things."
"The tradition of racism among white scientists is perhaps not surprising when we recognize that science and society co-construct one another..."
"Although openly eugenicist ideas are considered to be somewhat fringe, it is still clear from anthropological studies of science that the biology of the disempowered - such as people with XX chromosomes (often identified as women) of any race - is less likely to be studied."
"No one ever looks at a persistent correlation in science and says "that's just a coincidence!" But so often scientists refuse to acknowledge persistent correlations around racism in science."
"Standpoint theory - the idea that someone's particular social position can give unique insight into phenomena, insights others with different social positions would miss."
"I've grown up, and I know now that science is inextricably tied to power."