Who Gets to Study the Stars Shapes What We Think We See

By Andy — 2026-08-10 — Literary News

Today Spain goes dark at sunset. Not disaster-dark. The Moon will slide in front of the Sun for roughly two minutes, and those with the right sightline get to watch. It's the first time continental Europe has seen totality since 1999.

What's curious is that we treat eclipses as moments of perfect equality. Gay friends, Mormon families, atheists, whoever—everyone cranes their neck at the same thing. But that feeling of shared wonder masks something the books I'm turning over this week are keen to expose: your vantage point is never neutral.

Two Books, One Argument

Alfredo Carpineti's *Invisible Rainbows* and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's *The Edge of Space-Time* are both very readable popular science books. Neither one pretends that understanding the cosmos is simply a matter of pointing a telescope and recording what you find. Both show how the identities of the people asking the questions reshape the answers.

Carpineti—a founder of Pride in STEM—structures *Invisible Rainbows* around conversations with LGBTQIA+ astronomers and astrophysicists. The book is "organised around the electromagnetic spectrum," but its second meaning is "the astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists and many more scientists whose lives have, for too long, been hidden from view." It's not a trick. The book genuinely covers radio waves through gamma rays. But it holds the two things at once: rigorous technical content and the political reality that for decades, the field excluded the people best positioned to ask certain questions.

Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire, takes a different route. Her book weaves quantum mechanics, poetry, and references to figures like Sun Ra into arguments about how physics is not neutral—it's shaped by language, history, power, and the political choices of the people who practice it. She's writing what you might call cosmology for people tired of pretending science happens in a vacuum.

The Observation That Doesn't Land

What both books share is a refusal to separate scientific discovery from social reality. Neither author suggests that identity determines truth. Rather: who asks the question determines which truths get discovered, which phenomena get named, which patterns get visible first.

There's a temptation, when reading these books, to treat them as correctives. As if the field has finally woken up. But that misses the point. These aren't books celebrating progress. They're arguments that representation wasn't a nice-to-have. It was always structural to what science could do.

Consider: Prescod-Weinstein writes that "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." Simple sentence. It flattens the mythology around scientists as oracles. People study the universe. People have histories, biases, blind spots. That changes what gets discovered. Not because they're lying. Because attention itself is selective.

Today, when people in Spain look up at the Moon covering the Sun, they'll see the same object. But they won't be seeing the same thing. A physicist sees it differently from a poet. A person whose ancestors were forbidden to study sees it differently from someone who always could.

Carpineti and Prescod-Weinstein don't make this precious. They're not asking anyone to feel guilty. They're saying: notice. Look at who built the telescopes. Listen to who's asking the next questions. Your sense of what the universe is will change.