Fear of a Black Universe

by Stephon Alexander

  I did that. When Peskin takes a physicist seriously, he usually throws a question back at them, like a physics koan. After I explained my inchoate idea, Peskin challenged me to do some difficult warm-up calculation that would help my idea take shape. For me, it was important that he took me seriously and challenged me. Over eleven grueling months, with much toil and many calculations, those doodles on a napkin transmuted into a publication in the top journal in physics. We had created a new approach to understanding how matter over antimatter was created in the early universe. The paper opened up new directions in astrophysics and cosmology research; it has been cited over two hundred times.

  Michael Peskin is regarded as the “oracle” among theoretical physicists; he is very much an insider. But Peskin is unusual; he possesses a quality that enabled him to appreciate and perceive value in my style of doing physics and in the ideas that I generated that were different from the norm.

  Coincidentally, Peskin was an office mate at Harvard in the late 1970s with Jim Gates. At the time, Gates was doing pioneering yet nonconventional work on combining supersymmetry with gravity. Peskin was a young prodigy working in a different field of particle physics. Gates shared with me that Peskin took his work so seriously that he spent ample time learning the daunting mathematics behind supersymmetry and even applied it to his work.

  Were the expectations and consequences for doing innovative and transformational research simply lower for Gates, me, and other minorities in science? In April 2020 collaborators from the computer, education, and linguistics departments at Stanford University published results utilizing machine learning that asked the following question: Do women and minority scientists innovate as much as their white male counterparts? After a careful look at the research output and impact of 1.2 million women and minority scientists over twenty years, the findings concluded that women and minorities innovate novel contributions more than the majority group. Innovation involves publishing novel contributions that are used often by other researchers. Novelty enables new connections between ideas that generate knowledge. If those groups innovate more, how do we explain their lack of prominence and promotion in the scientific enterprise? In their paper, entitled The Diversity Innovation Paradox, the Stanford researchers explained that “Novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates.… There may be unwarranted reproduction of stratification in academic careers that discounts diversity’s role in innovation.”

  One of the authors of the research article was asked why the innovation from minoritized groups went unnoticed; he responded that “the fresh perspectives that women and nonwhite scholars bring are atypical and can sometimes be hard to grasp, so they get devalued by the majority.” A scientist like Peskin is rare: he could see talent when other insiders saw African Americans as deficient and as interlopers.

  In what follows, drawing on the two stories I just presented, we will dive deeper into how science and scientists can be better positioned to enable future breakthroughs that would otherwise go unnoticed or disabled. Let us keep in mind that there are many stories like this. We will end with an observation of what the scientific community can learn from the art world to transform itself to do better science.

  In a seminal work social theorist Robert Merton observed that better-known scientists get more recognition than a lesser-known scientist for the same achievement—he called it the Matthew effect, which alludes to a biblical saying, “for unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29). This is also consistent with the well-known saying, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” It can be tempting to explain away Gates and Nishino’s predicament with the Matthew effect. According to the Matthew effect, Gates’s paper would have likely been more widely cited and recognized had he been the chair at the top physics department, like Princeton, which was the home institution to one of the authors of the ABJM theory. This is partially true, because when he published the work with Nishino, Gates was stationed at a historically Black university that was trying to upgrade its visibility to the physics community. However, the Matthew effect does not fully explain why Gates did not get the credit eleven years later, since he is currently well known in the scientific community: he is the president of the American Physics Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a winner of the highest award given to a scientist by the U.S government, the National Medal of Science.

  Insight into Gates’s lack of recognition is tied with my experiences as a young scientist in spaces of high repute, where I was stigmatized and shunned because of social presumptions about my belonging in their cohort. And as we will see in what follows, there is a hidden gem for the advancement of science provided that we are able to clearly perceive the functioning of the blind spots of the scientific hegemony and place value on members who have developed new ways of innovating. To do this, I invite you to delve into the hidden ways psychosociological phenomena impact science.

  The various activities of scientific enterprise are carried out by a community of scientists, who form a scientific social structure—a normative order. What are the consequences for science when scientists act within social structures? We know that the institutionalization of science as academic disciplines facilitated its growth and its accomplishments.3 Is there an underappreciated flip side to this? Can the social order of science generate blind spots and even enable bad faith that prevent a better understanding of the mysteries we ponder? To answer these questions, it is useful to develop some tools of analysis from social theory.

  SOCIAL NORMS, CULTURAL NORMS

  While some might not have access to the kinds of experience of a Black person in America that would give the intuition of W. E. B. du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” social theory provides some insights and tools to enable us to transcend our collective blind spots to the benefit of scientific progress.4 My curiosity about my predicament as a scientist and desire to break new scientific ground led me to the works of Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology. Durkheim observed that we all live within social and cultural orders, that our lives are regulated by shared social values and moral obligations that he referred to as the conscience collective,5 and by shared cultural norms, which constitute meaning, and our commonsensical understanding.6 Social values validate social norms, which enable expectations that are differentiated according to social position, while cultural norms regulate the nature of meaningful actions. Social norms distinguish between right and wrong, while cultural norms constitute the difference between sense and nonsense, being an insider or an outsider.

  When thinking about the normative order of science, we need to distinguish between two sets of norms, cultural and social. The first involves the culture that regulates scientific activity, for example, that theories must be logically coherent and empirically warrantable. These norms differentiate between science and nonscience, as with paleontology and creationism, or cosmology and flat-earth beliefs. While this differentiation is permeable around the edges, the distinction between science and nonscience must be sustained. Social norms are the normative orders that create expectations within specific social circles of scientists; they define the boundary of what is accepted and valued within a specific group of scientists. For example, two competing yet viable scientific theories could vary in validity within different scientific groups on grounds of “taste” or the reputation of the architects of the theory. These judgments are mostly subjective but have consequences that help explain the two stories presented earlier.

  DEVIANCE BOTH ACTIVE AND PASSIVE

  We have talked about social and cultural norms and how they create the boundary for actions that are considered acceptable. But what about those who violate those expectations? Well, there’s a word for such violators: deviant. Durkheim posited that the social order is maintained and replicated by the existence of deviance; you can
not have one without the other. And this has big implications for innovation in science. In the first instance, violations of cultural norms make no sense, so we endeavor to make sense of them, often by labeling the violation, or violator, as “crazy.” Violations of social norms are “wrong,” and to reinforce our sense of what is right, we negatively sanction known violations of social norms. Thus, social and cultural orders are maintained by penalizing deviant behavior. When social and cultural deviance are punished, the punishment constitutes or reinforces the boundary between what is allowed and what is disallowed.7

  We need to be careful about the use of the word deviance, because it actually has two meanings. One meaning, the usual one, connotes a deliberate violation and disruption of the laws. You might think of someone who robs a grocery store. We can call this active deviance. However, the current social order in the scientific community institutionalizes and implicitly promulgates that people of color or women as categories of persons are incapable of doing science as well as white men. You might think of the ways such stigma has followed me through every level of study for reasons that have nothing to do with my actual ability, or the ways that I have described being pushed out of social groups for the crime of existing in the community at all. I am deviant by default. We call it passive deviance. The persistent unwelcoming behavior a scientific community exerts on minorities engenders isolation, which in turn can stymie productivity. The irony here is that passive deviant actors can be a positive asset to the scientific social order; this is, at least in part, because they are more likely to be positive deviants, to violate social and cultural conventions that restrict the bounds of scientific creativity. This is consistent with the research findings in the Diversity Innovation Paradox article.

  Deviant violations are punished; however, whatever form the punishment might take, this will both discourage future violations and reinforce institutionalized cultural and social expectations. As a consequence, physicists might be motivated to avoid forms of deviance that could result in creative breakthroughs. It is important to distinguish between deviant behavior that is harmful and deviant behavior that results in scientific innovations. Let us explore whether the latter may emerge among minority scientists who carry markers over which we have no control.

  Marginal people in disciplines like physics may be in a valuable position to innovate fundamentally because they are likely to expand the plurality of ideas, approaches, and techniques in the discipline.8 They are less likely than those who “fit in” to feel the pressure to remain within the constraints of their discipline. In my case, though I had the same technical training as my postdoc peers, my social isolation from the group enabled me to both not replicate conceptual blind spots and to embrace ideas on the fringes of established knowledge. But how could science emancipate itself from this fate of suppressing contributions from outsiders?

  As a youngster in the Bronx, I lived two blocks away from the last stop on the 2 train, which served as a depot for trains to be serviced. During the sleeping hours, regardless of the weather or unseen dangers, graffiti artists would gather at the depot to work on their masterpieces; my favorite was the larger-than-life spray-paint portrait of the Marvel comic archenemy of the Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, which covered an entire train car. The 2-train depot served as the local art gallery for schoolchildren as we waited for the daily yellow school bus. I and many of my friends were enchanted by comics and drew our own characters; we looked up to the enigmatic graffiti artists as intrepid heroes, modern-day Peter Pans who broke the rules to do their art.

  Painting graffiti on the subway came with the penalty of a fine or criminal arrest. Graffiti expression walks a fine line between art and vandalism. If a graffiti artist does not have permission, then the art is deemed illegal and is considered vandalism. Andy Warhol, an insider in the New York art scene, gave graffiti and street artists permission and validation to have their graffiti integrated into the art establishment. In the 1990s Brazilian graffiti artists were harassed and sometimes shot at by the police. Ironically, today Brazilian graffiti has led to founding art schools in low-income neighborhoods and to a collaboration with police to paint murals in devastated areas. These days, you can find graffiti art in the most prestigious art museums and galleries on the planet; the “best” work sells for astronomical amounts.

  There are some valuable lessons that science can learn from graffiti. The graffiti artists benefited the art establishment when they embraced their outsider status and continued making graffiti independent from the hallowed art galleries. For example, post-graffiti artists like Banksy, Samo (a graffiti duo of which Basquiat was a part), and Keith Haring established themselves, and continued to work on the outskirts, while gaining mainstream acclaim. Renowned graffiti writer Eric Felisbret says it well:

  From the perspective of a graffiti artist, the debate about whether graffiti is art or crime is pointless because, ideally, it is both. In the graffiti community a writer cannot achieve status solely based on artistic ability. The writer must also be willing to work outside the law and assume great risk. The movement—which I have been documenting in New York for over 30 years—was founded on this principle and it defines its essence.9

  Outsiders who craft nonconventional ideas and develop new techniques, similar to graffiti, can be seen as vandals, and that “vandalism” may be penalized. Innovating outside the mainstream is hugely risky. However, the realization that some forms of deviance result in positive accomplishments was a game changer for me. The sense of alienation I felt in science, with all its rejection and stigma, also comes with the advantages of being an outsider. There is value in having an outsider’s perspective and an opportunity for innovation from being in my natural state when I am taking intellectual risks. In 2018 I wrote in an essay:

  I’ve come to realize that when you fit in, you might have to worry about maintaining your place in the proverbial club. There are penalties for going elsewhere or doing things your own way, as nonconformity can feel threatening to the others in your circle.

  So, I eventually became comfortable being the outsider. And since I was never an insider, I didn’t have to worry that colleagues might laugh at me for an unlikely approach. Many times, that unorthodox approach actually led to new understandings.

  Both the art world and the physics world have deviant actors. The difference is that the art world has embraced graffiti, while the scientific community has yet to embrace those who take risks. It is clear that embracing graffiti was good for the graffiti artists, but I’d argue that it was equally good for the conventional art world. Imagine contemporary art without Basquiat’s beautiful and unsettling figures, or Banksy’s consistent challenges to authority in both art and politics. Imagine city streets in which all the street art and the brick-side murals are painted over. I don’t like to imagine a world without the richness and the beauty that those contributions brought.

  I like to imagine Basquiat as a physicist. I think of him strolling down his university’s hallways, maybe stopping briefly to chat with his colleagues. I think that the blackboards in his offices would be covered with drawings as well as equations. I think that students would come to peek at the art while he worked. If Basquiat were a physicist, his work would be as unconventional as his office. I expect that he would break the rules, and as graffiti artists do, he would take pleasure in doing so. And those students who came to watch him working, I think that they’d learn how to break the rules too. If Basquiat were a physicist, he would be able to recognize immediately the value of contributions that others in the field might see as simple heresy. And I’d like to think that a physics community that welcomed Basquiat into its fold would want to take the risks associated with giving such contributions a fair shot, even if the rest of the community might not immediately see the value in Basquiat’s work. I think such a community would be richer for his presence, and, for his presence, able to grow richer over time.

  A naive conversation about diversity in sciences, often f
illed with gesticulations of identity politics, sustains the smoke cloud that obscures the real issue, the true value of not completely belonging, of not always being comfortable around others, a discomfort that difference brings. Assuming that outsiders attain the competencies of the field, their outside perspective and nonconformity can be exactly what is needed to facilitate major breakthroughs. In fact, many significant innovations in science came from someone who was an outsider in a given field, someone who applied a new technique or perspective from another field. Perhaps this was because they were valued within both disciplines. Perhaps it is time to value and elevate minorities, thus enabling them to make major contributions, not in spite of their outsider’s perspective, but because of it.

  PART II

  COSMIC IMPROVISATIONS

  Cosmic Improvisations’ narrative and structure will proceed like a real-time jazz improvisation, wherein readers and I will solo on some of the most pressing issues and controversies in fundamental physics and cosmology. To this end, I have structured the rest of the book like a jazz album. In the jazz tradition, a tune often begins with the “head,” the main melodic theme. The head is connected to the harmonic and rhythmic structure—the form—of the piece. A soloist improvises over this form, using the head as a context in which to search for and discover new melodic ideas. Saxophonist John Coltrane’s improvisations exemplify this process: he integrated and creolized musical forms that were thought to be incompatible—as in, for instance, his masterpiece, A Love Supreme. He broke with tradition as he transcended it, incorporating in it the new musical styles he created. Using my three principles in Part I of the book, we’ll explore how new ideas in physics are created, and try to answer some of the biggest puzzles in cosmology—including the nature of the big bang, the cosmic origin of life, and the role of consciousness in the universe, as well as discussing the possible quantum nature of gravity, and the role of dark matter and dark energy in cosmic evolution. And we’ll do this drawing on my improvisations and work, as well as those I’ve undertaken with my collaborators. But we’ll also look at the work of other cosmologists and scientists. While improvisational logic is key to guiding us to new landscapes in physics, it’s not enough; as every jazz musician knows, we must also learn from the improvisations of others.