“We Live Inside the Sun.” Who Studies the Universe Changes How We See the Universe

“We Live Inside the Sun.” Who Studies the Universe Changes How We See the Universe Steven W. Thrasher on New Books by Alfredo Carpineti and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein On Wednesday, the small slice of humanity which is scattered across rural Russia, northern Spain, eastern Portugal, Iceland and Greenland will experience (and, if we’re lucky, actually see) a total eclipse of the Sun. In Siberia, this ethereal dance will happen shortly after dawn; in Reykjavik, in the late afternoon; and, here in Valencia, the celestial pas-de-deux will boogie down just before sunset, right above the horizon. This will be the first complete solar concealment on continental Europe since 1999. Total eclipses actually happen somewhere on Earth every 18 months. But, because the vast majority of our planet is covered in water and non-arid land, they are rarely observed by human eyes. (Not a single currently living Spaniard had been born when the Moon last fully eclipsed the Sun in these parts in 1905.) My solar posse will be a motley crew: gay friends who live in Valencia, a sprawling Mormon family who’ve traveled all the way from Salt Lake City, and me, traveling not so far from Greece. But whether we be Mormons, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, nontheists, Black folks, white folks, Latinos, gays or straights—when we view an eclipse, we share something fundamentally in common. For an eclipse day is a holy day of Sun worship. And it can remind us of the subjectivity and positionality of how we perceive the wonder of the universe—and, paradoxically, the universal nature of the universe itself. “The universe—including the human corners of it—is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more, no less.” Two beautiful, very readable new books about astrophysics cover this sensation of wonder, which toggles between identity and infinity. Invisible Rainbows: The Unseen Universe Beyond Our Senses is by Dr. Alfredo Carpineti, a queer Italian astrophysicist and editor at IFL Science, and The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie is by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and scholar of Black feminist science studies. Both books depict how understanding the universe depends upon who is allowed to study (which, in turn, allows us to understand ourselves beyond ourselves). “There is a bizarre cultural tendency to treat physicists in particular as fascinating enigmas whose brains exist beyond the realm of everyday human politics,” Prescod-Weinstein writes. “This isn’t true. The universe—including the human corners of it—is enigmatic, queer, surprising, and endlessly fascinating. But we physicists are just people, no more, no less.” “When I look inside and see that I’m nothing, that’s wisdom. When I look outside and see that I’m everything, that’s love. And between these two, my life turns,” the Hindu teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj once said. It’s a phrase that resonates with me when I look up at the stars and ponder the vast spaces between them (and the space inside the atoms that make up “me.”) Using queerness, feminism, theoretical physics, Judaism, an Italian penchant for pasta, and the Black radical tradition, Carpineti’s and Prescod-Weinstein’s books helped a lay reader like me to navigate that wondrous space between the self and the universe in which “my life turns.” “As a Black physicist,” Prescod-Weinstein writes while reflecting on Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, “I have tried to grow the seeds that my ancestors passed on to me. The ancestors could fly. I do too, whenever I am able to escape into looking at the universe through the lens of quantum fields.” Both she and Carpineti help us to perceive that when we look up at the Sun—which I will be privileged to do with my naked eyes for about a minute during totality—we are not looking at some far away star, nor do we need keep the physics of thinking about it far away, either. For we live inside the Sun. And it is our divine right to think about this. * “Scientific work does not exist in a vacuum,” Carpineti asserts in Invisible Rainbows, “its context in the social and historical sphere where it sits, matters.” Dedicated to “all the queer kids reaching for the stars,” Carpineti repeatedly reminds us that “while science is incredibly precious to humanity, it can also be messy and political.” Who observes the natural world, to a great degree, shapes how we understand that world—how we might internalize a sense that the “cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself,” as Carl Sagan put it. “To do cosmology—to study the beginning of space, time, matter—is to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history,” Prescod-Weinstein asserts in The Edge of Space-Time, conjuring Black storytellers in the oral tradition. But who has not been allowed to study the stars is equally important, and a running theme in both books. Carpineti’s eponymous rainbows are a rich site of inquiry, as rainbows have been a symbol of wonder for humanity in general long before the 1940 film The Wizard of Oz and Gilbert Baker’s 1978 flag turned them into symbols of gay culture specifically. “The rainbows that you see are just for you,” Carpineti notes, conveying a sense of relativity which is always key to understanding physics: “No one else in the entire Universe ever has or ever will see that rainbow.” (Referring to “queer phenomenology,” Prescod-Weinstein also stresses the importance of “the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins.”) Composed of seven colors, rainbows are a manifestation in the human eye of light that is always around us. Indeed, as Carpineti breaks down, the universe is awash with “seven broad categories” of light: “radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma waves.” Carpineti and Prescod-Weinstein and their interlocutors repeatedly trouble the notion that the universe can be reduced to binaries. But, he warns, “we cannot discuss infrared light and ignore the controversy surrounding the naming of the largest space telescope after James Webb, who was involved in the mass dismissal of homosexual people from the US government in the 1950s.” Prescod-Weinstein reports that when Edward Murrow was head of the U.S. Information Agency and “wrote to NASA administrator James Webb in 1961 to suggest that the United States send ‘the first non-white man to space,’” it was Webb who “replied that such a choice was ‘inconsistent with our agency’s policies.’” There “is a tendency to talk about science as if it is a thing that exists outside of scientists” while “the reality is that we scientists are story-crafting,” Prescod-Weinstein notes. But many griots have been pushed out of their place in keeping the celestial story. To this end, Invisible Rainbows and The Edge of Space-Time both offer a correction to the exclusion of scientists and astronauts who were not straight white men, especially in their choices of interlocutors. In addition to Sun Ra, Prescod-Weinstein is in literary conversation with physicist Edward Bouchet (“the first African American to earn a PhD in the United States”), poet Natasha Trethewey, sociologist Heba Gowayed, and Star Trek astronauts Lt. Uhura, Lt. Geordi La Forge, and Commander Benjamin Sisko. Meanwhile, introducing each interlocutor with their pronouns, Carpineti serves a “tasting menu” which is eaten over “conversations with LGBTQIA+ astronomers from around the world” and paired with queer-coded metaphors like a disco ball, cocktail recipes and Britney Spears songs. (“Metaphor isn’t just a useful tool for communicating to general audiences about science,” Prescod-Weinstein writes, “it is part of how we make sense of science, part of how we make science. And it is important to note that it is we who make the science.”) Carpineti’s casual conversations span from talking black holes with Dr. Sthabile Kolwa (she/they) at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, to dishing on asteroids which could destroy the Earth with planetary scientist Dr. Ed Rivera-Valentin (he/they) at Johns Hopkins in the United States. Carpineti and Prescod-Weinstein and their interlocutors repeatedly trouble the notion that the universe can be reduced to binaries. If you want to understand physics, Prescord-Weinstein advises, “You must be willing, like Alice in Wonderland, to go through the looking glass, again and again,” and be “willing to change your worldview when the math, the experiments, and even sometimes theories demand it.” The arguments in The Edge of Space-Time make a compelling case against the current race to reduce understanding the world into a literal binary code of ones and zeros: the push for data centers and so-called “artificial intelligence.” Despite their readability, both books are challenging to comprehend in parts—especially when trying to explain the Big Bang and the origins of the universe. But, as Prescod-Weinstein notes, “it’s okay to reread something that feels confusing for you the first time.” Indeed, “We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms” (instead, I’d add, of “training” computers to reduce the complex world to easily digestible binaries). In what I read as a pedagogical rebuke of “writing” with Large Language Models or relying on apps like “Blinkist” to summarize whole books in 15 minutes—not to mention universities turning education over to so-called “AI”—Prescod-Weinstein writes that “Not only is there nothing wrong with learning, there is also nothing wrong with having questions which are not readily answered.” For “When you know a little about the abstract nature of the universe,” she writes, “it looks and feels different from before—and no one can take that experience away from you.” This is probably part of why, in 2024, the New York State Department of Corrections placed prisons on lockdown and let the guards watch the eclipse, but would not let tens of thousands of the imprisoned see it. (While a scant six people held in New York prisons sued and won the right to see the eclipse on religious grounds, everyone else will have to wait to see one in New York until 2079—a 55-year waiting period, during which most of them will die.) * Plagued by political problems very much of this planet, 2024 was probably the most difficult year of my life. But the weight of those worries was lessened by two wonders: witnessing a total eclipse of the Sun and the Aurora Borealis for the first time. I had seen total lunar eclipses before. I can still remember the feeling of terror as I saw my first one, in 1982, as a small child. As the Moon turned red, my teenage sister Jinger told me it was because it was bleeding and the blood was going to fall to Earth. I screamed, averted my eyes, and covered my head to keep the blood from dripping on me. (Prescod-Weinstein is right about the power of metaphor affecting the science we make; though I never became the astronaut I dreamed of being when I went to Space Camp, I am now a phlebotomist who has studied blood as a social scientist for many years, and I often think about the Moon when I draw blood.) And I had witnessed several partial eclipses of the Sun, most recently in 2017—an event which felt like it collapsed the 93 million miles between the Sun and my friends laying on our backs on a Bushwick, Brooklyn rooftop. “Even though the Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon, it is also about 400 times farther away,” which “makes the Sun and the Moon appear almost exactly the same size in our sky.” But nothing prepared me for the sensation when I was laying in the grass in Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 2024, next to my friend Carolyn and her kids, staring through glasses at the Sun and then—as people began to scream in wonder—taking them off and looking right up into the Sun. It was like looking into the face of God. Even being an adult who knew what was happening, I felt every bit of terror of that little boy cowering from the blood of the Moon. What must this have been like for people who had no idea what was happening millenia ago? It must have felt like the end of the world!!!!! As I looked up, I began to weep. Similarly overcome, my friend’s teenage son jumped up and began running around, as if possessed. I was raised in a tradition of Buddhist-infused Christianity that does not perceive Christ as the sole key to the divine, but as an example of how each person of any faith (or none at all) has the key to the divinity of the universe within them. Looking up into the Sun’s corona that day made me feel the same sense Jesus conveys in the Gospel of Thomas: “I am the light above everything. I am everything. Everything came forth from me, and everything reached me.” Meanwhile, “As the Moon covered the Sun, the whole place went silent for a moment before erupting into joyous screams” Carpineti writes of viewing that same eclipse but from a beach in Mazatlán, Mexico 1,750 miles away in Invisible Rainbows. “It felt akin to a religious experience.” Eclipses occur due to a mind-boggling cosmic coincidence: the Moon is about a quarter million miles from the Earth and the Sun almost 100 million away; and, at the same time, the Sun’s diameter (about 865,000 miles across) is about 400 times bigger than the Moon’s (2,159 miles). As NASA explains, “Even though the Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon, it is also about 400 times farther away,” which “makes the Sun and the Moon appear almost exactly the same size in our sky.” A further poetic accident: Because the Moon annually drifts a few centimeters away from us, it looks a little smaller from Earth every year and, eventually, will be too far away to create a total solar eclipse. (Not to worry about this in your lifetime, however; it will take more than 600 million years for the Moon to wander away from us for total eclipses to end.) When I experienced totality, it made me happy to be alive—a sensation I rarely felt in 2024. But I did feel it a second time that year, one night in October, a particularly lonely time in Chicago after I had been suspended from teaching. It was during a rare visible appearance of the Aurora Borealis over Lake Michigan. Because not just my eyes but my iPhone could show me usually-invisible rainbows, I had that sense I’d felt a few months before, during the eclipse: that we are not looking at the Sun. We are inside the Sun. (Perhaps, we even are the Sun.) “Aurorae can be seen with the naked eye at higher latitudes (and at lower ones if the Sun is in a particularly active portion of its eleven-year cycle),” Carpineti explains. “Charged-up particles from the Sun interact with a planet’s magnetic field, following its lines that go from one pole to the other. These particles, usually electrons, eventually slam into the atmosphere, and, depending on the energy of the charged particles and their interaction with the magnetic field, they can penetrate more, slamming different gasses—nitrogen or oxygen on Earth—and produce different colors.” Like some of the scientists Carpineti speaks to, light itself fails to fit into a simple binary. “Light is two things at once,” Carpineti explains. “Light is waves that travel across vacuum and transparent materials, and light is also particles, which we call photons, delivering energy in discrete packets.” Seeing the Aurora reminded me that whatever bullshit is plaguing us on this Earth, we are living inside “a giant bubble around the Sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere,” as NASA explains. This “constant flow of charged particles” from the Sun is “called the solar wind, which ultimately travels past all the planets to some three times the distance to Pluto before being impeded by the interstellar medium.” For everything we eat, everything we do, everything we are is powered by the Sun. I think of this sometimes when I enjoy a tomato in the Mediterranean (where, when you look up at the yellow disk in the blue sky over Athens, you can easily imagine why the ancient Greeks perceived it to be a yellow disk being hauled by the god Helios and his four enormous winged horses). I think of the seed that began in the Earth, and poked its head up, and furled its leaves, like solar panels unfurled to power Helios A and Helios B—probes launched by NASA in the 1970s to study the Sun. (Indeed, the only human objects to leave the heliosphere are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—and it took them more than three decades traveling at 38,000 miles per hour to reach interstellar space.) I also think of this while remembering another excellent book by a gay science writer, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life by Ferris Jabr, which explores how life did not develop on the Earth as much as it developed of the Earth—and, I’d add, of our nearest star. (Remember, as Jesus put it in the Gospel of Thomas, how we both are and come from the “light above everything,” how Dave Bowman said “My God, it’s full of stars” in 2001? The Sun can say to us, “Split wood. I am there. Lift up a rock, you will find me there.”) For everything we eat, everything we do, everything we are is powered by the Sun. * In lucid, poetic prose and with helpful diagrams and metaphors, Invisible Rainbows and The Edge of Space-Time invite us to explore our positionality in the universe—and to have a sense of queer wonder about it. The entry point to doing so may be the grandeur of an eclipse or an aurorae (or the Artemis II shooting to the moon). But the light of the universe is all around us, even when we can’t see it with the naked eye, waiting for us to understand it (and ourselves) better at all times. When Voyager 1 looked back at Earth in 1990, it showed a tiny, “pale blue dot” without any political borders. And just as the shadow of the moon will pass over many-a-nation without knowing of such made-up borders, Invisible Rainbows and The Edge of Space-Time can help us to understand ourselves as citizens of the cosmos—not of any one nation. As Prescod-Weinstein said on Reveal, “I think our current ecological circumstances teach us that patriotism conceptually, politically, socially, and from a futurist perspective has very limited value because our ecosystems don’t actually have borders and the ecological impacts of things like bombing Iran and bombing Gaza. Just an hour of a fighter jet in the air, the amount of fuel it uses and the emissions that comes out of it, that is a problem for everybody on planet Earth, regardless of where they are.” “And so,” she added, “I really think we will gain a lot from understanding ourselves as citizens of Earth. Citizens from a cosmic perspective, I actually think that that’s one of the things the cosmic perspective offers us, is the opportunity to recognize that these social constructs are just that: social constructs, and that they don’t necessarily serve our long-term survival.” Steven W. Thrasher Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, CPT, a journalist, social epidemiologist, and cultural critic, holds the Daniel Renberg chair at the Medill School of Journalism, and is on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. A former writer for the Village Voice, Scientific American and the Guardian, Thrasher is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. [Photo by C.S. Muncy]