If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what’s exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, The Edge of Space-Time, was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space? What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions – even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe.
I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Eventually, I read Hawking’s book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day.
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Today, I’m a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group – but that’s not every day. And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets.
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The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it. I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.
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I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren’t good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter. And while I think these questions are important and interesting, they live at a kind of margin that physicists are pushed to by economic and social forces that determine which questions we can be paid to pursue and which we won’t be.
When I began working on the book in 2023, I was in the midst of a five-year stint working in US science policy, alongside colleagues from around the world (mostly the UK, Europe and Canada). As I learned more about the politics of science at the government level, it became clear to me that particle physics and cosmology were in trouble. Politicians were no longer sold on the fundamental importance of our research and didn’t see how it was beneficial to the capitalist economy or the military, which historically is how that support has been rationalised. The cultural arguments – that a well-cultured civilisation does things like try to understand the universe – didn’t seem impactful at all. And the general public, struggling with climate change and economies that don’t serve the 99 per cent, couldn’t see how we had anything to add.
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I could see that we were about to be on the margins in a new way. And so The Edge of Space-Time became not just a return to my roots and the big-picture questions that once drove me, it also became a plea: don’t let me be the last of my kind. The cuts that are being made to science in the UK and the US right now seem like a political problem that is easily remedied, but it is more complicated than that. Even one year where there is a gap in funding means we haemorrhage workers who may never return. As those researchers leave, they take with them knowledge. Because the sciences work through apprenticeship, if there is no senior instructor to pass on knowledge, it doesn’t matter if there is money and an apprentice waiting in the wings.
With The Edge of Space-Time, I take readers on a journey through huge questions, like why does my favourite physics experiment foist the structures of quantum physics on us? And will we ever know what space-time really is, or is it always just going to be a useful mathematical construct that allows us to calculate motion in environments where gravity plays a significant role, like near black holes?
While thinking through the physics, I also try to make the case for why any healthy democracy needs people who live at the edge of what is known and what is unknown – the keepers of these cosmic stories that have fascinated humans for millennia. I make the case that, like poetry, physics gives us a viewpoint on the universe that we need because it is our ancestral inheritance. I also argue that spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions.
Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever. Thinking a bit about the various edges of space-time, like black holes and cosmic event horizons, can help us build the better world we need.
The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books) is the September read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.
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