When Brown University cosmologist Stephon Alexander steps up to the podium in June to accept the 2024 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Achievements in Science, Philosophy, and Leadership, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, he will step up to the dais high in both intellectual and entertainment value.
Perhaps he will tell his fellow associates tales of his early childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, and of his subsequent family move to the Bronx at eight and of attending DeWitt Clinton High School, where he fell under the spell of physics and its teacher Daniel Kaplan, and where he would skip school to go on private excursions into Manhattan and groove on the palaver of a group of truant misfits calling themselves the Five Percenters.
Or he could discuss how he overcame his “fear of failure and the feeling of being an imposter” as he rose through the ranks of researchers in theoretical physics, becoming “the only black physics PhD student at Brown (and one of three in the US),” and how that fear and feeling carried over to his postdoc studies at Imperial College in Britain with Nobel laureates, where he resisted being just another physicist who would “shut up and calculate,” and instead improvised and mooned over the brave new work in quantum mechanics. And even when he returned to the States to do a rare second postdoc at Stanford those feelings persisted, but were now seen as useful anxieties for the production of meaningful discourse and theorizing in string theory.
He could tell his associates about Einstein’s underappreciated musicality, and Frizzled Mane’s imaginative romps through the cosmos, his childish delight in astral projections, his gedankenexperiments that led to his general theory of relativity and how he inspired those researchers in supergravity who followed in his stardust. Alexander could tell of how he was awed by his encounter with Nobel laureate Chris Isham, who advised Alexander on how to become a good physicist: “[S]top reading those physics books. You need to develop your unconscious mind; that’s the wellspring of a great theoretical physicist.” This was excellent news to the improvisational mind of Stephon Alexander.
If worse led to worst, then Stephon could lay aside the jibber jabber and pull out his saxophone and play a number from his album, Here Comes Now, perhaps the tune inspired by his friendship with Ornette Coleman, “Inside the Mirror,” which explores the place of self in the cosmos. Or he could play some Coltrane and reprise a short Wired talk where he relates how the great horn player’s music showed him the relationship of physics to music, which led to his writing The Jazz of Physics, which was published in 2016.
Or Stephon could just stand up and deliver some of the ample intellectual goods from his two books, The Jazz of Physics and the 2021 volume, Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics. Each of them is powerful in unique ways.
The Jazz of Physics is an excellent book. It’s full of interesting and unusual anecdotes. It’s well-paced and pays homage to the greats of cosmology and astrophysics. It’s written by someone who appreciates the need to use colorful analogies to explain difficult concepts in science. The memoir that takes you through the author’s early introduction to science — by way of music. Alexander is a musician—a saxophonist—already in a band by the time he is introduced to his first charismatic instructor, Mr. Daniel Kaplan, at DeWitt. Alexander describes how Kaplan introduced the very first class to physics:
Mr. Kaplan walked into the middle of the room, sat on an empty desk, and took a tennis ball out of his pocket. He threw the ball up in the air and caught it.
Kaplan then asks the Question that hooks young Stephon, “What’s the velocity of the ball when it returned back to my hand?” And when the kid responds, “It’s the same,” the teacher smiles, and the beginning of a beautiful relationship is had. It gets even thicker, when it turns out Kaplan is a master composer and plays baritone sax. Their stars are aligned. (Alexander re-tells this episode with Kaplan in a TED talk worth watching.)
Eventually, Kaplan steers Alexander toward John Coltrane and his secret link to Einstein. Alexander returns to this moment, not only in the book, but later, after his career in cosmology has taken flight and he finds himself delivering a TED talk and holding, then bouncing a tennis ball while asking Kaplan’s question of the audience. This connection between Coltrane and Einstein becomes an inspiration for Alexander’s later adventures in string theory—resonant both in his physics mind and on the sax. This is, of course, a very welcome key insight to Coltrane’s musical thinking for those not fully invested in his sound.
It turns out that Albert Einstein was a music lover who played the violin and piano. We’re told that his wife would watch him tinkle and tickle the ivories (and the ebonies) and then jot down figures. Alexander tells us about the general connection between Einstein and Coltrane:
[Coltrane] was a musical innovator, with physics at his fingertips. Einstein was an innovator in physics, with music at his fingertips. Nevertheless, what they were doing was not new. They were both reenacting the connection between music and physics, which had been established thousands of years earlier when Pythagoras—the Coltrane of his time—first worked out the mathematics of music. Pythagoras’s philosophy became “all is number,” and music and the cosmos were both manifestations of this philosophy. In the mathematics of the orbits of the planets rang “the music of the spheres,” playing a harmony with the tones of a vibrating string.
One amusing section of the book is Alexander’s description of skipping school and going off on adventures in the city. He tells of coming under the unintentional but eventually welcome tutelage of a group of misfits calling themselves “the Five Percenters.” They had a strange cosmology that entertained the notion that “humanoid-like aliens [had come] from space to interact with ‘the original Asiatic black man.’” (Sounds like Sun Ra already.) They would hold “intellectual debates” that Alexander likens to “battle rap” that he sees as a form of escape from a bleak future. Alexander tells us,
I sought my escape through comic books, video games, and my newfound love for science. These guys adopted a worldview from their leader Clarence 13X, a former student of Malcolm X, who, after attaining spiritual enlightenment, spread the following gospel throughout the streets of New York City:
– 85 percent of the masses blindly follow religion.
– 10 percent of the masses are deliberately misleading the masses.
– 5 percent are enlightened and realize that they are “gods” of their own destiny.
– Mathematics is the language of reality, and in order to master nature, a Five Percenter must understand the mathematical patterns underlying nature: they called this supreme mathematics.
Alexander is strangely influenced by this latter insight, and its implied freedom is an inspiration for his own future mathematical and musical flights of “elegance.”
In the first chapter of Fear of a Black Universe, “Escape from the Jungle of No Imagination,” Alexander states, “Dark energy resides in all empty space, not just outer space, and permeates all existence.” Then he spends considerable time telling us that “we” don’t know what it is, but it’s everywhere, and it’s the real star of the universe, not light and matter. He chides those colleagues too afraid to face the monster under the bed, and asks rhetorically, “Do we dread the dark so much that we project our fears onto the very phenomena about which we are scientifically ignorant?” He adds, “Does the scientific community fear embracing ‘dark’ ideas from outsiders, especially if the ideas may not be in a form that the community is comfortable with, if they do not fit seamlessly into our theories and expected practices?” This question is at once both scientific and sociological. As readers, we cringe and immediately see its relation to the title.
Alexander is interested in taking aim at the “institutionalized cultural and social expectations” he has to deal with as a minority in his field. Race is decidedly an issue. Will one succeed in belonging to the club? If allowed in, will one’s white colleagues resent the inclusion? Alexander believes outliers like himself bring value that is not recognized. He explains:
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. 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?
In Fear of a Black Universe,we read again about superpositions and emergence and changeless change and the lectures of Chris Isham, Quantum Cosmology professor at Imperial College in London. And once again Isham is telling Grasshopper to look within his dreams and in the work of Carl Jung for clues as he navigates his way through the universal labyrinth. He has weekly discussions with Isham and comes around seeing from his mentor’s point of view:
One of those was the problem of time in quantum gravity. While our physical (and psychological) experience of the flow of time is taken as fact, time disappears in the equations of quantum gravity. Isham worked on this problem and was a proponent of a new notion of time called internal time. It was no surprise to me to learn that these ideas were inspired by his exploration of psychology and mysticism.
The point is both interesting and still relevant. The other day I was perusing an article posing the premise that “The Afterlife Is In Our Heads,” an epiphenomenon, as it were. No matter how one resolves questions about the substantiality of time or afterlives, we are still left with phenomenological questions about how and why these seem to appear. Returning always to the phenomenological is just fine with Alexander.
It’s also the case, though, that scientific conclusions—or paradigms—are temporary. In Fear of a Black Universe, for instance, Alexander attempts to push the envelope of the universe’s expansion. But even as I was reading the book, articles popped up in my inbox telling me that the notion of an expanding universe may now be in question.
Whatever the case may be with expansion, nothing could prepare me for Alexander’s end game. In search of what was once called a God particle in physics, Alexander delves into pantheism. Moving into the black ether, Alexander discovers instead not just that consciousness is in everything, but that black consciousness is in everything. He discusses the notion that “that the universe was just one of many, which have a vast range of possible values for the cosmological constant, without any first principles to force its value.”
This scenario is only really possible as a panpsychic schema. Alexander continues:
Panpsychism posits that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter, the same way that mass, charge, and spin are intrinsic to an electron. So according to panpsychism, the electron and all substance come equipped with their own internal protoexperience of being an electron. This might sound crazy. Definitely there’s a question about how an entity, say an electron, can have its own internal experience without resorting to an electron brain. The answer requires new physics or a fresh perspective on known physics.
Courage and imagination are prerequisites for such a shift. Or, as Alexanders posits:
The time has come for a new Newton, to reunite the physics of the extraterrestrial with the physics of the terrestrial. Such an integration might facilitate our understanding of dark matter and dark energy, enabling a better understanding of who we are and of the cosmos in which we live.
If Alexander is correct, we might still ask: perhaps Alexander himself will turn out to be the new Newton—or the new Coltrane.
Fear also brings us on a little journey to the Bantu-Kongo people of West Africa for inspiration and answers. Alexander writes:
In the Bantu cosmology the universe started in a state of nothingness called mbungi. Here nothingness includes the absence of space and time. Physical objects, such as particles and fields, usually exist in space-time. So mbungi is a prephysical state that is divided into what manifests as the physical, spatiotemporal world and a universal consciousness.
Unpacked, the concept of mbungi would have radical implications for how we conceive of the physical. Alexander surmises:
Let us assume that consciousness, like charge and quantum spin, is fundamental and exists in all matter to varying degrees of complexity. Therefore consciousness is a universal quantum property that resides in all the basic fields of nature—a cosmic glue that connects all fields as a perceiving network.
To one unreceptive of an outsider’s perspective in physics, this may appear as baseless heresy or simply evidence that Alexander has been sniffing glue. I would tend strongly toward the opposite view: Alexander’s perspective may have the capacity to transform both physics and the sciences in general. And, indeed, adopting such a view may have implications beyond the scientific realm as such: taken seriously in a broader social milieu, perhaps it would end racism as we know it.
Select portions of this essay have previously appeared in the author’s review of Fear of a Black Universe published in Op-Ed News.
John Hawkins
John Hawkins is a freelance journalist and poet who writes mostly about culture, politics, and the arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the University of New England (Australia) and, simultaneously, a masters in humanities at Cal State Northridge. He blogs at his Substack site, TantricDispositionMatrix.
