*That's pretty good. It's actually more interesting than her peculiar work attempting to map dark energy.
Why are you doing this science thing, well, it's like this, you see
(...)
You then started a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science, which you wanted to pursue in conjunction with physics. Why?
I wanted to be the kind of person who does cutting-edge science and also thinks deeply about the process of science. I was going to be both the insider and outsider. This is a theme that has haunted my life, always, in every which way — personal, emotional, psychological, scientific, intellectual. This feeling of being an outsider and occasionally feeling like an insider. The conflict.
Why do you think you feel that way?
Being female; being brown; being interested in physics; being highly intellectual in this particular way. And because of the cultural transitions that I had made. One of my professors, Evelyn Fox Keller, put it very nicely — that it took me a very long time to find my tribe. I didn’t feel lost, but I felt alone. I still feel it in a lot of ways. There are situations in which I really feel that I don’t belong. And re-entering the same setting at another time, I have felt completely at ease, and I feel like I belong. It’s very weird. I think it’s a deeply psychological thing. I left home very young. And there was this real need to want to be connected.
How would you describe your tribe?
People who have many serious interests that they intellectually engage in. People who are not solely careerist. My game — cosmology, dark matter, black holes — has a very particular competitive culture that I don’t fit into. But thankfully this is the thing that time does. If you stick with it, you do good work, then you don’t have to conform; you can eventually just be who you are. I always felt that I had a very special clarity of mind because I knew what I wanted out of what I was learning. I want a certain depth of understanding that comes with people who think mathematically.
What do you want to understand?
I am attracted to certain very particular kinds of abstraction. We all have our pet things that somehow we gravitate toward, and for me it’s always been these invisible entities: black holes, dark matter, these things that are almost at the limits of our knowledge. All physics breaks down when you reach the edge of a black hole. So it sort of seduces me. These are the things that really push us as scientists: How can we model them? How do we think about them? And as we know more: How can we refine our model? When you improve it, does it mean the thing you had before was wrong? How is a model related to reality? That was going to be the theme of my philosophy Ph.D.: How do you build knowledge?...
