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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Read the intro to @chanda.blacksky.app’s new book while waiting for her to speak at Harvard last night, and these two paragraphs alone should convince you that this is a book you need to read.

Cover of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Edge of Space-Time

Excerpt from intro:

When it's at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors-and a producer of metaphors in its own right. I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a way of understanding the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere.
This helps us see why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechan-ics. And if we cannot learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastrophe for the rest of us. That's always been true, and it always will be.

Dr. Amy Lee @minisciencegirl.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Wow.