THIS year I made what may have been a mistake: I agreed to write two books. And having written that sentence, I feel compelled to reassure both of my editors (should they see this column) that all is totally fine, I am on top of this and you will get my drafts by the agreed dates.
Both books, in different ways, are about the cosmos and my (maybe strangely) enduring love for the thing. I say strangely because of the year we have had 鈥� turmoil on Earth might make the wider universe seem less relevant. But there is a cosmos beyond the bad things humans get up to and there are people getting up to great things too.
I find the pressure of working on my second and third books kind of terrifying having won some awards for my first one, The Disordered Cosmos: A journey into dark matter, spacetime, & dreams deferred. But I have found pleasure in one element of preparing for the task: reading what other people have to say in order to deepen my knowledge of the concepts I plan to write about.
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The book I need to do the most reading for is an academic one, which is different from what we call a trade book, which is the kind aimed at general audiences. Academic books are typically put out by university publishing houses and academics are generally the main audience, although many of them are written with a crossover to the general market in mind.
My proposal for this book went through peer review, and I had to respond to feedback from anonymous commentators, making the case for how I would address perceived weaknesses. A trade book never has to go through this process and is only vetted by its editor.
I have given myself something of a challenge with this academically oriented project, tentatively titled The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic and which will be published after the tentatively titled The Edge of Space-Time, which is my next book on science for generally curious readers, like those of 快猫短视频.
In the former, I am bringing together ideas from Black studies, feminist thought, history of science, philosophy of science and the theory of aesthetics, which is the corner of philosophy concerned with art. I have no formal training in any of these areas, although I have now been working at them long enough that people in some of these fields see me as something of a peer.
It is possible I don鈥檛 know what I am doing. But it also means that I have got an excuse to do some reading that stretches my imagination. For example, I鈥檓 poring over The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black radical thought of Beatriz Nascimento, edited and translated by Christen A. Smith, Beth芒nia N. F. Gomes and Archie Davies. The late Nascimento was a Black Brazilian cultural worker who had some fascinating notions about the metaphysical relationships between Black feminism, space and time.
The tentatively titled The Edge of Space-Time is my next book on science for generally curious readers
As someone trained in the Anglosphere, I am relishing this opportunity to understand how Black thinkers around the world used the cosmos as a palette for .
I think after the year we have had, that is exactly the kind of influence I need as I chase quantum fields into 2024.
