Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

ZSC

What does it mean to be a particle cosmologist?

CP-W

[Laughs.] Since I'm having a good day, I’ll say something positive and not about university bureaucracy. My job is to think through the fundamental questions of where we come from, who we are, and what makes our universe. Another way of thinking about it is that I use math to describe our world through the perspective of particle physics and cosmology.

ZSC

Do you experience awe in your work?

CP-W

I'll tell you the thing that’s really been on my mind this week, and this is a total coincidence: one of my closest friends just had twins and named one of them Zora. Part of how I'm honoring that decision is spending time with Zora Neale Hurston’s work, and I just read her short story, John Redding Goes to Sea. John Redding is a boy who’s deeply curious about exploring the world beyond his immediate community. Ultimately, he’s asked to do something by a white man and the story ends tragically, but his character resonated with me; I saw my younger self in that tension between precarity and curiosity.

What I mean is that white supremacy means not only a precarity of opportunities but also that many of us may end up doing something different from what we once wanted. As someone who just went through the process of getting tenure, I am conscious of the compromises that I’ve made to secure my position. I don’t mean moral compromises—I think that I’ve been pretty good about being someone that, at 15, I would have respected— but the intellectual compromises that come with trying to satisfy this publish-or-perish culture. You have to work out the tension between experiencing awe and doing awe in a capitalist American 21st-century society because, at the end of the day, we’re in an economic culture of extraction that doesn’t mesh well with “this is fucking awesome, let’s do this because it’s beautiful.” I don’t think these pressures are unique to physics or astronomy, but Hurston’s story stood out to me because, in some way, it was saying, “You have one life. You have to work out how you’re going to honor awe within a world of constraints.”

ZSC

I know you’re also a Jane Austen fan, and of course, there’s the titular reference to Langston Hughes’s poem, Dreams Deferred. Can you speak about the centrality of literature to your work?

CP-W

I grew up in a family that really valued the spoken and written word, and Hughes has been with me from the start. I can tell you the very first Hughes poem I ever read was “Miss Blues’es Child.” I included his poem, “Dreams,” in the epigraph of my dissertation. The other poet who comes up in the book is Adrienne Rich. When I first picked up Adrienne Rich, I didn’t realize how much we had in common. At that point, I wasn’t reading for what it meant to be Jewish and to be a woman. I was a few years out from realizing that I was queer. So, she was a poet I loved before I realized all the different parts of me she was speaking to.

ZSC

Rich comes up several times in Disordered Cosmos as you think about the relationship between justice and science.

CP-W

Yes, Rich was there, and I should also mention Def Jef’s song, “Black to the Future.” I wanted to ensure that the language which shaped my thinking was in the book. I knew that Black readers would recognize the title “Dreams Deferred,” and I wanted the cover to call out to them because science books are so rarely written to Black people. I wanted my book to be explicitly in conversation with that history. I object to the popular argument that science writing shouldn’t be literary. In terms of my writing process, I tried to read the entirety of the book out loud to myself for its sonic rhythm, and my voice crumbled after a couple of chapters and a computer did the rest of the reading. I'm not Jane Austen; I don't think I nailed every sentence, but I did try to listen for the rhythm of the language. 

ZSC

The notion that science writing cannot be literary must be a presumption about who gets to be a believable observer. Can you speak about your paper, “White Empiricism and The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics,” and how that paper was received?

CP-W

In that paper, I accuse physicists of ignoring data that contradicts previously held points of view and shaping what we know about science by making artificial determinations about who can participate. People read the title of the paper and had a meltdown because they thought I was saying that Black people come up with different physics than white people. It was deeply race-essentialist, hardcore biological race science that anybody who knows me would know I would have a problem with. And ironically, it was actually a great example of white empiricism.

From my point of view, my personal essays are an insistence on empiricism and a refusal to put up a facade of false objectivity; this story comes to you through my fingers, so I’m honest about my involvement. I address this more head-on in the paperback, but I’m very fortunate to have Kiese Laymon in my life. When he read a draft, he told me it was a memoir. Now, Kiese is a genius, and he also wrote a brilliant memoir, Heavy, for which he won the Carnegie Medal. So, at some point, if Kiese says it’s a memoir, I have to grapple with what that means.

In the introduction, I inserted something along the lines of “I am not the center of the story, and if you think I'm at the center, then you’ve missed the story on some level.” From my point of view, I was using a personal essay to talk about science; that’s what physicists do when they write popular science books. Cosmos is Carl Sagan’s perspective on the cosmos. A Brief History of Time is Stephen Hawking’s. Naturally, the way I think about science will differ from them because I'm embodied and articulated by the world very differently from them.

ZSC

Did you anticipate this kind of reception of the book as a memoir?

CP-W

Kiese hipped me to it, but I was blogging when Jessica Papin, now my book agent, approached me about writing DC. I was like, “We shouldn’t even schedule a call unless you understand that I'm not going to write a memoir.” She said, “We can still talk. You have this whole body of work online. You don’t need to write a memoir.” I realized that some of this comes down to how we conceive of memoirs and what scientists are doing when they write about their own science; when a scientist sits down and says, I’m going to write my perspective, my science story, and this isn’t necessarily already in the direction of memoir. In the process of articulating that, I did then have to ask myself, why is this book not a memoir? The place I came to and come from now is that I will agree it’s a memoir when people agree that all the books that white male scientists are writing are memoirs, too.

ZSC

What did blogging mean for you?

CP-W

I came of age as a theoretical physicist when theoretical physicists communicated with each other via blogs. A lot of this exists on Twitter now, but when I was in graduate school, physicists were circulating articles, discussing their work, and in conversation via blogs. Clifford Johnson, a Black British String Theorist, had (and still has) a blog called Asymptotia. Sabine Hossenfelder, Julianne Dalcanton, Sean Carroll, they were all part of these conversations. We’d hang out in comment sections, basically tweeting but slower and in a comparatively long form. Around that time, my PhD advisor, Lee Smolin, wrote a book called The Trouble with Physics. I was surrounded by physicists who were writing when I decided to start a blog. I named my blog The Disordered Cosmos based on my first PhD paper with Lee about disordered non-locality.

ZSC

Did you have a clear vision for what you were doing?

CP-W

I don’t think so. I was like 24 or 25 when I started it. When my ex-wife and I got married, I announced it on the blog, but I was also posting my early experiments with writing about the statistics of Black women in physics, my first time going into the National Science Foundation data. I don’t know if this is insulting to the younger me, but I was mimicking the grownups, and the grownups were talking to each other on blogs.

ZSC

Were you thinking about privacy while writing Disordered Cosmos? Did you feel protective of your personal life?

CP-W

I think—maybe you understand this—when your immediate family members are in the public eye in a particular way, you may have a specific kind of relationship with people knowing things about your family life. If I were to write about my childhood and all of that, I would be making choices on behalf of other people for whom there’s already public interest. If I tell a story about my summers with my grandmother in the working-class neighborhood of Kilburn, London, there are now stories about Selma James that are not necessarily about me. I do share some stories about my mother, Margaret Prescod, but I was very conscious of the fact that my mother is a public figure in her own right. They are both lifelong feminist organizers who have campaigned for Wages for Housework: Selma, my paternal grandmother, was a founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and alongside Wilmette Brown, my mom co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework. I had a whole childhood in the milieu of the Wages for Housework Campaign, and I’ve actively made a choice not to discuss it publicly. The other thing is, while I think my personal life is interesting to people who know me, I don’t believe those are the most interesting stories I have to offer to the world. In my writing, I draw on my personal life to describe larger structures at work, but I’m extraordinarily selective. For me, the cosmos is the story.

ZSC

I understand, especially your protection of the people you love. There’s also a chapter in which you write about the direct impact of PTSD on your work and what it means to do science.

CP-W

Speaking specifically about rape as part of the scientific story, I think that particular chapter is an example of what someone could point to as memoiristic. The chapter opens with a meta-description of its own coming into existence: I was trying to write about dark energy and found myself writing this other thing. In some sense, I presented that phenomenon occurring while I was attempting to write about science as a data point. And that’s how I thought about it: I’m presenting this as a data point about what it means for someone like me to do science.

The other thing is, I didn’t know when or if I would get to write another book, and I was hearing my 21-year-old graduate student self saying, “You can’t gloss over this because you don’t want it to be part of the scientific story. It was part of the scientific story.” I had to give her that. Everybody makes choices about what scientific story they craft for the public about their life in science, which is really what defines the genre of popular science; Brian Keating, in his book Losing the Nobel, writes about being on the tarmac in Antarctica just after his father has died and that book was never labeled as memoir. It’s a book that was highly valuable as a contribution to the discourse about how science happens while also explaining a bunch of cosmology. Still, I am struck by how differently his personalization of scientific practice was received than mine.

I will also say specifically to my politically attuned literary family that a politic is associated with these genre labels. After Kiese and I had that exchange, he visited Cambridge for a reading. We were in the Harvard bookstore, and he asked what section I thought my book would go in. For most of college, I lived three doors down from that bookstore, and this was my moment to dream about my work. It was important to me that I could insist on where I wanted my book to physically live in the world, and I wanted it to live in the science section. I wanted my legacy to be in the science section.

ZSC

How do you navigate the boundaries between physics and philosophy?

CP-W

I would have given you a different answer to this question a year ago, but this year I was unexpectedly tasked with teaching a first semester of graduate quantum mechanics. This is not a class I ever thought of as my pedagogical specialty, but we had a need in that area.

In a course like this, students are learning a mathematical framework that departs from what they’ve been taught in classical physics. This is hugely important for material science and atomic physics, disciplines that undergird technologies with very real implications, but it also raises a lot of questions that are considered questions for the philosophy department and not physics. You don’t teach interpretations of quantum mechanics in a quantum mechanics class. All of these things about the multiverse and/or what people call the many worlds theory in quantum mechanics, the many worlds interpretation, and these early debates about what quantum mechanics actually meant—do not get taught to physicists. As an undergraduate, you see Quantum Mechanics once or twice. You see it again as a graduate student in a physics program -- not in astronomy but in physics programs. Each time, really, it’s teaching you how to calculate without thinking deeply about how fucking weird it is.

ZSC

It is really fucking weird. You’re thinking about particle physics at the interface with gravity and what the math asks us to do is question our intuition about space and time. Then there’s your writing about intuition in terms of binary thinking.

CP-W

Yeah, I once heard that the Iraqi-British drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi was on Channel 4 News UK explaining their nonbinary experience, and the presenter asked how that could seem intuitive. Amrou was like, “particles can be a particle and a wave simultaneously.” [Laughs.] “So, if particles can be both, why can’t people?” There’s all this conversation about how quantum mechanics is totally non-intuitive, but as non-binary people, it is intuitive. In terms of what gets taught, the analysis I brought to bear is that it is about capitalist notions of utility. It’s useful to know how to calculate with quantum mechanics to make predictions in a way that can be assigned a material value. That’s simply not true about, ‘Well, what does it all mean?’

ZSC

So, the question of whether or not something gets taught is also answered by its material value to the capitalist engine.

CP-W

Not to mention our military. Ironically, the foundations of quantum mechanics is a highly marginalized field. Getting a faculty position is almost impossible if that’s your specialty. And if you’re doing a Ph.D. in that area, you kind of know that your Ph.D. might be the last thing you ever do as a physicist in your area of Ph.D. training. I think some of the reasoning behind why Quantum Mechanics is receiving more support now is for a resurgence of interest in quantum information and quantum computing. Someone was assigned to email me and try to build a relationship with me on behalf of the National Security Agency. And it was like, surely you know I’m never going to answer these emails. Surely you know. [Laughs.]

ZSC

I think that’s easy to infer from your work. Do you feel there’s a lot of misconception about what it means to work in quantum mechanics?

CP-W

There’s the public performance of what quantum means: What we are told, how the media reports on QM, and what gets emphasized in popular literature or in places like American Scientist or Scientific American. Then, there is what you can get paid to do as a physicist, particularly in academia but also in industry; it’s not to think about the questions that are considered philosophical. Back to what you were saying about the bifurcation of science and philosophy, QM raises all these philosophical questions, but we have the saying that a scientist should “shut up and calculate.” There were so many questions that I wanted us to be thinking about in that Foundations of QM class. At the same time, I understood the pressure we were under to cover what my students were expected to know. I think it happens more with quantum mechanics than anywhere else.

ZSC

Do you find space for those kinds of questions? Does it have to be a personal project on one’s own time?

CP-W

I sit on the advisory board of the nonprofit funding organization, The Foundational Questions Institute (FQxI). FQxI’s mission is partly to give people the opportunity to think through those big foundational questions. What is time? What is consciousness? How do you get from excitations of the vacuum to particles that construct atoms that form molecules to life that fits our contemporary definition of consciousness? The continuous challenge with the nonprofit structure, in general, is that somebody has to voluntarily give the money. In terms of resources, how do we incentivize people to spend time on these questions? How can we put money into their hands?

I’ve been on the advisory board for a few years now, and I got a significant grant from them when I was a postdoc, but I was one of those people who thought that these questions about quantum mechanics were for philosophers and above my pay grade. I felt, “I'm not smart enough to think about things like that.” Teaching that quantum mechanics class really just reconfigured my attitude about it, I had a deeper appreciation for the importance of FQxI’s work as well as the limits of its capacity.

ZSC

You’ve mentioned that you were partly shaped by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as a teenager. Can you tell me about that experience of discovering his work and what that meant for how you imagined yourself as a scientist and writer?

CP-W

When I was in high school, I had this three-hour round trip on the school bus, and I would spend part of those rides reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I knew that I eventually wanted to return to East L.A. with particle physics in my hands, and I knew that I wanted to write my own Brief History. I don’t think The Disordered Cosmos is that book. The title itself, Dreams Deferred, is recursive. It’s a love note to the universe, but it’s also about how fucked up science is. It’s the tension of “I love you, but why is everything trash.” I wanted to write a book to my community and the first vocabulary I had for thinking of writing to my community was writing to East LA. That’s one of the reasons the book is partly dedicated to East L.A., as well as Brooklyn, Barbados, and Haiti. I knew I wanted to write a book, but I will openly say that I never wanted to write this book.

ZSC

[Laughs.] And you’re working on two books now.

CP-W

[Laughs.] Right. In the paperback of The Disordered Cosmos Note to Readers, I reflect on the things I wish I had done better, like pacing the science to make it more accessible and acknowledging the anxiety that mathematics and science can bring up for people. I now have a book under contract with Pantheon Books called The Edge of Space-Time, which is being written from that place. It is also a book about why anybody should give a fuck about particle physics or cosmology in the midst of authoritarian fascist crises. I’m thinking a lot with the poets Natasha Trethewey and Robert Frost. The other book, The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic, is under contract with Duke University Press, and theorizes science as a Black episteme. I’m thinking about the place of science and the cosmos within the philosophy and analytic frameworks of Black aesthetics. I’m arguing against the bifurcation of Black art from science.

ZSC

I’m wondering if there is a particular work or salient story that shaped your thinking about the relationship between Black aesthetics and scientific practice.

CP-W

Elizabeth Hamilton, a brilliant art historian at Fort Valley State College, has a beautiful book Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art. In the discourse about Afrofuturism, people are very good at recognizing when musicians or visual artists are grappling with technology but rarely frame those artists as repurposing scientific concepts within their creative practice. More recently—and this is a funny coincidence because both you and I are featured in this issue—I returned to Lorna Simpson’s cover for the January and February 2021 issue of Essence magazine, which features her collaboration with my fellow Bajan Rihanna. That series of collages was amazing on so many different levels and is part of an extended engagement that Simpson has had with putting the cosmos directly in relation to the Black body. From my point of view, she is honoring that relationship after centuries of indoctrination that we are not of the cosmos and that the cosmos is not reflected in us. I don’t think we can look at the scientific aspects of that as an aside. I think that what’s happening there is actually a rejection of a false bifurcation. Do you know Katherine McKittrick's book, Dear Science and Other Stories?

ZSC

I have it next to me! I’ve been re-reading the first chapter—it’s incredibly rich.

CP-W

Katherine is an extraordinarily rich thinker and writer. I interviewed Katherine for Public Books, so I have three copies of it, and every copy of the book has a different set of comments—It’s actually kind of a nightmare, I have to go through all three to find one note. Dear Science will be one of the guiding frameworks for The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic. I don’t think that I would have this work without Katherine and Elizabeth Hamilton’s work.

ZSC

Do either of the books you’re working on now, The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic or The Edge of Space-Time, feel like that book you mentioned before—that you imagined you’d one day write?

CP-W

The interesting thing about A Brief History as a kind of metric is that I have to be mindful that Hawking was crafting a story for the general public, in part because he was passionate about the ideas and an excellent public communicator but also because he was motivated by the same material concerns as the rest of us. Certainly, Hawking had a lot of support from the NHS because, particularly at that time, it was a proper healthcare system, but he still had medical needs that went beyond what the NHS typically affords. He got by through writing and speaking engagements; he was earning money the same way the rest of us are. The book as it exists today is a construction—its making may not have been as elegant. That said, I don’t feel like I’m on the other side of my biggest contributions to physics. I feel I have struggled with this publish-or-perish culture and compromised on where I have spent some of my time. I can see the ways in which the ideas that I have had about the dark matter particle that I work on have shaped the direction of research, but I also don’t know if those are lasting contributions. I still want to make a contribution to the world that feels meaningful and creative, but I don't know if I'm writing from that place yet. In John Redding Goes to Sea, I think Hurston's writing about the same dilemma as Hughes in Dreams Deferred. I’m constantly trying to get to the point where I no longer feel like my life is a story of deferring dreams.

ZSC

You once emailed Stephen Hawking for his advice on becoming a theoretical physicist. What did that exchange mean for you as a young person? Do you receive those kinds of emails now?

CP-W

I was eleven and emailed Hawking directly, asking how one becomes a theoretical physicist. A graduate student of his at Cambridge University responded and gave me this clear path—get into an amazing undergraduate program, get your Ph.D., and teach. That was how I ended up applying to and then attending Harvard. I don’t get those kinds of questions myself from anyone that young. I get questions from graduate students or people applying to graduate school. More recently, I’ve been getting questions from Muslim and Arab students who are applying to graduate programs and trying to figure out where they will feel welcomed, given the current political environment and discourse about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism where Arab and specifically Palestinian people are treated like they are not human, like their lives don’t count. In those cases, students are asked if they should mention their identity in their application.

ZSC

What do you tell them?

CP-W

Look, Graduate school is long. It’s a long time to hide parts of yourself. People know what they’re signing up for with me—if they take me, they’re taking all of me. Now, that’s a personal choice. I can’t make that call for anybody else—only we know what we can live with. I want to look back and be proud of my choices. That’s one of the reasons I’m starting to turn back to the scientific questions that drive and excite me. I’m asking myself why I always have a stack of Quantum Field Theory books on my desk and why I never get bored reading QFT. You can see the stack behind me. [Laughs.] I used to feel that way about General Relativity books, but now I just have one GR book on my desk.

We all have to ask ourselves these questions, and my task is not to tell students to think like me but to give them frameworks for thinking through these questions. The piece of advice that I have to give student organizers is that your science has to be excellent because people will go out of their way to impeach your science when they don’t like your politics. At the end of the day, it might not be to one’s advantage to include activism in an application for postdoc scientific research because that’s not what you’re being hired for – service doesn’t count until you’re faculty, unfortunately. People don’t like hearing it, they’ll say I’m one of the conservative old boys, but that’s the tension; the community we make is important, but we’re making that community so that we can do science.

ZSC

In DC, you wrote about a conversation wherein your mother said your work was necessary because “people need to know that there’s a universe beyond the terrible things that happen to us.” Does physics still feel that way for you?

CP-W

Over the summer, I learned there’s a lot of emotional unpacking that comes with getting tenure. As a professor, you spend a lot less time doing the research yourself and a lot more time coming up with the ideas and then supervising other people’s execution. In physics, a Ph.D. is an apprenticeship, and a postdoc is kind of like a senior apprentice; he's semi-independent. Training apprentices meant that I didn’t do many calculations by hand. So, I took three weeks this summer to just sit and do the math. Math calms me in a way nothing else does—by not calculating, I realized I’d starved my brain of oxygen.

ZSC

What happened when the summer ended?

CP-W

At first, I became depressed; I felt I was being taken away from the science that I loved in order to be a scientist. Only in the last month or so did I realize I just need ten minutes every day to sit with a pen and paper and work through a calculation. I need the physicality of that experience for my psychological well-being, and I’ll be honest— I get anxious under the pressure to produce new ideas. I would probably be happy just reading textbooks for the rest of my life. I don’t feel the need to constantly invent ideas. [Laughs.] At the same time, I’m obviously obsessed with other people’s creativity.

ZSC

It’s interesting to hear you say that because your work strikes me as profoundly creative, especially if creativity is about linking seemingly disparate ideas or ways of thinking—which I think it is. Your work is very singular and interdisciplinary.

CP-W

I do, on some rational level, understand that sentence construction is where some of my creativity comes out. Sometimes, I get tagged in a tweet, and I’m like, “Oh, this sentence is really great.” Then I realized I wrote it, and it’s from The Disordered Cosmos. [Laughs.] But that’s not how I experience the book. I see everything that’s wrong with it. In my early experiences in college, I was treated in the physics classroom like I had nothing to offer. Intellectually, I understand what’s wrong with that narrative, but it is also very much part of my emotional experience; I do struggle with not feeling good enough for this work. I’m trying to get my younger self to see that not every dream has to be deferred; there are dreams to be lived. Writing The Edge of Space-Time has been an opportunity to exercise my agency in exploring what excites me and the thrill of getting to share that with others.

ZSC

What is something that excites you right now?

CP-W

When it comes to the book? The cosmic history of platinum and process of its origin. Platinum gets made at a certain point in the universe in Supernova and kilonova. Billions of years later, enslaved people in South America were forced by Europeans to mine it, and then centuries after that I’m wearing it in my wedding rings, and it’s part of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, my favorite physics experiment. In writing up the Stern-Gerlach experiment, I read the original papers and realized that they had used platinum. Since Europeans didn’t even know about platinum until they learned about it in Latin America—they initially thought it was shitty silver— I started to ask where the platinum came from. I recognize that my brain is interested in telling stories that have this reach in terms of time and space—that it’ll go from Supernovas to platinum mines and slavery—and I’m trying to step fully into that version of myself and allow myself to feel good about it.

ZSC

Speaking of, what is a beginning? What is a world without a beginning?

CP-W

I like that question. What makes this question so great is that it feels like it’ll fuck you up a little. We’re in a political moment with the rise of authoritarian activity and politicking, and we need questions that feel impossible, that we’re still trying to grapple with, and that remind us that total control isn’t actually available to us. I think a lot with Vaughn Rasberry's Race and the Totalitarian Century, a highly interdisciplinary book of literary analysis. Part of it deals with how Black artists and thinkers like Paul Robeson and Shirley Du Bois, have grappled with the totalitarian nature of American white supremacy. For example, I don’t feel white supremacy in the room with me right now, but it is. When Robin DG Kelley is writing about freedom dreaming, he’s also analyzing how Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black artists responded to racial totalitarianism. I found reading in those terms to be really productive for me and to help me think about what people need some freedom from.

Years ago, I would have been afraid to say this, but part of my work is totally self-serving; I’m trying to explain myself and my existence. That is my freedom dreaming. When I meet people like you, who tell me that this book spoke to them— that was also the goal, that was the work it was supposed to do, and that means it's not just for me. In this post-tenure moment, now that I have economic security that I almost couldn’t imagine at any other point in my life, I also have some hard-fought intellectual freedom. I’m trying to ask myself: what is nagging me? So certainly, like you asked, what’s a beginning? What is the vacuum? There’s a real question of how you bridge the vacuum as interpreted through general relativity with the vacuum as calculated with quantum mechanics.

Right now, the thing that’s tingling in my brain is wanting to return to questions about particles coming into existence in empty space. Really, I need to make a decision about a solution to the cosmic acceleration problem, like whether I’m going to go along with the crowd that thinks it’s solved by some version of the landscape multiverse or whether I’m going to continue to be dissatisfied by that and seek out another solution. For various reasons, I’ve been put in a position to vocalize certain questions, like what does it mean for the universe to have a beginning or not? The questions are opportunities for awe, but in terms of answers, the most compelling responses are creative, and most of them don’t involve mathematical equations. Take harmonic oscillators, which really are anything that behaves like a pendulum or has a restoring force like a Slinky: the kinds of resonances that you get from a musical instrument come from oscillations. On top of that, sound is a wave, so the sound is functionally an oscillator, too.

ZSC

[Laughs.] And light.

CP-W

Yeah, this is the thing— it’s all waves! They say it’s turtles, but it’s waves all the way down.