Pun Salad

In my youth, I was a physics major, and my graduate career, such as it was, was at the University of New Hampshire. (I got my Masters degree before flaming out pre-PhD.) I try to keep up with the field at a dilettante level, and pay some attention to the doings at UNH's Department of Physics. Which is how I became aware of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (CPW); she is (now) a tenured Associate Professor in the department, and also in Women's and Gender Studies. I reported on her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, here.

Back in the day, physics "survey" courses were labeled, somewhat disdainfully, "Physics for Poets". (The geology version: "Rocks for Jocks".) Especially in the early going, this book reads like transcribed lectures from CPW's "Physics for Poets" course, if she had ever given one. (That hypothesis is strengthened by the book's subtitle.)

And there's nothing wrong with that! CPW is enthusiastic about the field, and she does a decent job conveying the mysteries and weirdnesses that abound in modern physics and cosmology. But one of the constraints of a "for poets" course (or book) is math: you can't write a freaking formula, lest >90% of your students (or readers) zone out (or stop reading). Alas, the only tool we have to describe such phenomena accurately is math. Without that, you're mostly handwaving, albeit in an entertaining way.

CPW's shtick is to interlace her physics with hard-left ranting; odd and irrelevant observations; plugs for her favorite authors poets, and TV shows; and occasional f-bombs (keeping it real!). This may work better for some readers than it did for me. Unfortunately, the rant/physics ratio seems to go up as the book moves along. Genocide, the Middle Passage, Colonialism, capitalism (with its associated evil, neoliberalism), etc., etc., etc. are continual targets of CPW's drive-by commentary.

She is a big fan of the late thug/poet Nikki Giovanni; this made me recall what I wrote about her back in 2009, when UNH invited her to keynote its 2010 Martin Luther King "celebration". (Which they stopped celebrating a few years ago.)

CPW does not like Erwin Schrödinger, avoiding terms like "Schrödinger's Cat" and "Schrődinger Equation". Even though she's complimentary about "queer" manifestations of sexuality, it seems that Erwin's type of queerness was a bridge too far.

Some things just made me wonder what point CPW was trying to make. She identifies Plato as "a philosopher from the Balkan peninsula of Asia." She's talking about Greece! (A couple pages later, Aristotle is "another Balkan peninsula philosopher.")

CPW refers throughout to the "nightmare global-warming scenario", seemingly unaware that even its past advocates have given up on its plausibility.

A trip to Dodger Stadium would not have been complete without the mention of the "mostly Mexican-American families" that Los Angeles kicked out of Chavez Ravine for its construction.

For same reason, CPW can't help but observe that John Stewart Bell (he of Bell's Inequality) "absolutely comes off like a bit of a queen."

Some outright bloopers seemed to have been missed. Ones I noticed: a footnote on page 80 uses the word "acceleration", which should have been "direction"; there's a missing minus sign on an exponent on page 86; the word "enormity" is misused on page 176; and this discussion of a plot point on Star Trek: Discovery on page 250 is truly mystifying:

But it turns out while Dr. Culber was dying at the end of set nonbreaking space between his husband—ship's engineer Paul Stamets (beautifully played by Anthony Rapp)—unintentionally transferred Culber's essence to a fungal network with a kiss.

Nonbreaking space: the final frontier!