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A review by rogoreads
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
3.0
This is a tough book about an important topic. I suspect it will make a bigger impact on me long-term than it had while I was reading, because throughout I had to sort of drag myself through a lot of parts. This is not a beginner's book in the slightest, and that goes for most of the topics covered: being marginalized in science; the history and ethics of physics; white supremacy and capitalism; the physics itself. I struggled with a lot of it, including the physics, and I'm someone who's recreationally read other math and physics books in the past.
Professor Prescod-Weinstein clearly brings important perspective to the table. For example, I hadn't read much about the thirty-meter telescope on Mauna Kea and how it infringes on native sovereignty, and this book changed how I think about it. I also have not read nearly enough about what it's like to be thrown into an Ivy-league school on work-study, without enough support, and having to be an "only"--I thought being a woman in engineering got lonely, but it's nothing to what it is to be a black woman. I also appreciate the callouts to all the non-white men who have been erased from scientific history.
But I still found myself frequently lost. It was hard for me to follow a through line in parts. I understand that many of these issues interlock, but the chapters themselves seemed more like standalone blog posts. They brought in some of the same themes over and over, and then suddenly the author would reference something else that I could tell I didn't have enough context for. So the book felt sprawling and repetitive while still not always explaining enough.
Maybe it's on me, though. A lot of people have rated this book very highly so if the topic interests you, it's worth giving it a try.
Professor Prescod-Weinstein clearly brings important perspective to the table. For example, I hadn't read much about the thirty-meter telescope on Mauna Kea and how it infringes on native sovereignty, and this book changed how I think about it. I also have not read nearly enough about what it's like to be thrown into an Ivy-league school on work-study, without enough support, and having to be an "only"--I thought being a woman in engineering got lonely, but it's nothing to what it is to be a black woman. I also appreciate the callouts to all the non-white men who have been erased from scientific history.
But I still found myself frequently lost. It was hard for me to follow a through line in parts. I understand that many of these issues interlock, but the chapters themselves seemed more like standalone blog posts. They brought in some of the same themes over and over, and then suddenly the author would reference something else that I could tell I didn't have enough context for. So the book felt sprawling and repetitive while still not always explaining enough.
Maybe it's on me, though. A lot of people have rated this book very highly so if the topic interests you, it's worth giving it a try.