When many kids were running around playing tag or video games, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was thinking about particle physics.

After her mother took her to see "A Brief History of Time," Errol Morris' 1991 documentary about theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, she fell in love with the discipline. She was just 10 years old.

Nearly 30 years later, she is the first Black woman to hold a tenure-track faculty position in theoretical cosmology as an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. Prescod-Weinstein is one of the country's few core faculty members of both physics and women's and gender studies departments at a higher institution.

In her new book, "The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred," Prescod-Weinstein invites readers into the universe as she sees it -- and as a self-described queer agender Black woman, she sees it differently than many people.

Her book chapters -- including "The Physics of Melanin," "Black People Are Luminous Matter" and "The Anti-Patriarchy Agender" -- show her focus "at the intersection of astrophysics and particle physics" and at the intersection of physics and Black feminist thought and anti-colonial theory.

Her book is a tour of particles like quarks and leptons, as well as the axions that Prescod-Weinstein specializes in, but it also explores the various structural oppressions that affect who gets to study and discover them -- and even who gets to name those discoveries.

She points to terms like WIMP -- weakly interacting massive particles -- and its relative MACHO, or massive astrophysical compact halo objects, as examples. "You can tell that physicists love an acronym," she wrote, "and that the physicists who came up with WIMP and MACHO were almost certainly men."

Women and people of color, she notes, are routinely left out of histories of science, despite their important role in the progress that White men are credited with making. Prescod-Weinstein asks us to consider how science would be different if scientists were from more diverse backgrounds, and if it incorporated Indigenous scientific knowledge and voices.

We spoke to Prescod-Weinstein about her ideas and her hopes for future scientists.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

CNN: The subtitle of your book combines dark matter, space-time and dreams deferred. How do those three things intersect for you?

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I'm a dark matter expert, and so of course, the dark matter -- an invisible form of matter that we believe comprises 80% of the universe -- is going to figure into it in some big way. And dark matter exists in this larger context of space-time, which is how Einstein's theory of relativity requires us to think of space and time, as existing in relationship with each other.

I also wanted to be honest that this was going to be part of the larger social context and not just the larger physical context. That larger social context is dreams deferred. That is both a comment on the social issues that I raise in the book, but also a comment on having to raise the social issues.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/02/world/black-scientists-structural-racism-scn-wellness/index.html