Much of the praise for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s debut book in 2021, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred,” lauded the way she used personal experiences in physics to discuss the social and political inequities that exist alongside scientific breakthroughs.

“It contains the narrative of dreams deferred,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, explained in April at a bookstore in Chicago. But its very existence, she said, also “represented a dream deferred, because that was not the dream of what my first book was going to be.”

Her second book reclaims that dream. Released on April 7, “The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie” is less pain and more play, a homage to the big questions that made Dr. Prescod-Weinstein want to become a physicist in the first place. She begins the book by asserting that it is humanity’s duty to uncover and share the story of our universe. Her latest offering toward that duty is a journey through physics that is tightly bound to her own cultural roots.

In the midst of a multicity book tour, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein spoke with The New York Times about guiding readers through the cosmos from her own point of view and about some of the art, poetry and literature she drew on to shape that journey. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why include so many references to poetry in a book about physics?

I knew poetry before I knew physics. It was part of my upbringing. I loved A.A. Milne’s “Now We Are Six” and Edward Lear’s “Nonsense Limericks.” Both of my books draw their subtitles from Langston Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred.”

Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” became a guiding light for how my work would move in the world. It also opened up for me that I need language. That’s true among physicists. Even an equation is a sentence; even an equation is telling a story.

As physicists, we’re always working in language to connect what we learn with what we know. Poetry is one of the first places that my brain goes to draw those links. Language, as it moves in my brain, is often in Hughes and Rich and Shakespeare. Those are the lines that flicker up for me.

What if we got away from the argument that doing cosmology and particle physics is practical or materially valuable? Then we have to accept that we’re like the poets. What we do is important culturally in the same way poetry is. A piece of this book is me saying there is value in banding with the poets, and fighting for the value of being curious and trying to articulate the world with whatever tools are available to us. Not for the purposes of selling something, but for the purpose of fulfilling our humanity.

Another theme throughout the book is the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her adventures in Wonderland.

Being a science adviser on future installments in The Legendborn Cycle, a fantasy series written by Tracy Deonn, is one reason Alice is in my book. It has allowed me to be open to the playful side that physics, as a Black queer person, can take from you. I wanted the book to be whimsical, because that’s who I was when I first arrived in physics, and that’s who I want to be when I die.

Part of the call of quantum physics is to change what our sense and sensibility are. When you look at the world through this framework — like the idea that particles have spin but don’t really spin — it sounds like nonsense. Except that’s literally how the universe works. Physics is our “through the looking glass.” It’s real.

Your first chapter invites readers to reflect on the metaphors used to describe the universe, like the “fabric” of space-time or electromagnetic “fields.” Why open in this way?

A lot of books about quantum physics start with its history. I wanted as much as possible not to just do that. I had actually planned to start it with the Stern-Gerlach experiment of 1922. But then I read an essay by the poet Natasha Trethewey about abiding metaphors and started to ask myself what the abiding metaphors of my physics training were.

We don’t ever take time in our classes to ask, “What do we mean when we say ‘space’? What do we mean when we say ‘space-time’?” There are these metaphysical questions that I often told myself were for the philosophers. This book was me letting myself think of them as physics.

One metaphor you invoke is the “edge” — not only the edge of the universe and of scientists’ understanding, but also existing at the edge of certain identities.

In “Disordered Cosmos,” I talked a lot about being at the margin and looking toward the center. With “The Edge of Space-Time,” I’m choosing to make the margin the center of the story. Part of that was me fully embracing what makes me the physicist I am. I’m an L.A. Dodgers fan. I love “Alice in Wonderland.” I love “Star Trek.” There’s lots of all of that in the book.

Picking a metaphor is a culturally situated decision. I wrote a line that says black holes are the best laid edges in the universe. I did, at some point, think that only some people were going to get this. But for people who don’t understand the reference to Black hairstyles, the sentence is still legible. And for those who do, it will feel like we just had an in-group moment. Anyone who thinks about laying their edges deserves to have an in-group moment in a physics book. Because we are physics, too.

Black students are often told that if you want to be a physicist, then you will make yourself as close to such-and-such mold as possible. At a young age, we have this understanding that whiteness and science are associated with each other, but we are also witnessing in ourselves that this can’t be entirely correct. There’s this narration of, “Well, sure, you can be Black in physics, but that means you have to acclimate to the ‘in physics’ part, and never that physics has to acclimate to the Black part.”

I use the example of rapper Big K.R.I.T.’s song “My Sub Pt. 3 (Big Bang),” in which someone tries to wire up subwoofers in his car but fries the wires because he doesn’t ground them properly. I don’t know if Big K.R.I.T. would think of this as a science story, but I think we should learn to read it as one. Not to contain it in science, but to say it overlaps there. This can be a rap song. It can be about the cultural significance of subwoofers and the Big Bang as a metaphor for the beat. And it can also be about cosmology and about how everybody who wires up cars or does this kind of work is a scientist, too.

How do you want readers to approach this book?

There is this feeling that you’re supposed to read a book like this and walk away an expert. That’s actually not the point of this book at all. The point is to wander through physics. Even if math terrifies you, you are entitled to spend some time with it.

And so here, I have made you a book with a bunch of tidbits on the oddities of the universe. The universe is stranger and more queer and more wonderful and more full of possibility than whatever limitations you might be experiencing right now. Physics challenges what we are told are social norms. For example, non-trinary neutrinos are fundamental to our standard model of physics.

“Non-trinary,” as in they shift between three different forms.

Non-trinary is natural. It’s such a challenge to the current anti-trans rhetoric that says people can only ever be one thing.

I don’t need my book to be the most important thing that someone reads. But I want it to be a source of hope. If it reminds you that, as my mom says, the universe is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us, then that’s all you need to remember. I’m good with that.

At 11, Tim Bovard undertook his first taxidermy experiment on a piece of roadkill. He had found an unlucky skunk and improvised its reanimation using an instruction book, much to the alarm of his friends’ parents.

His own parents were unfazed — his father and grandfather were both scientists and outdoorsmen — and soon it was known in their suburban community of Claremont, Calif., that, as Bovard recently recounted: “Dr. Bovard’s son was an animal nut. So when they found the abandoned birds, owls, hawks, kestrels, crows, blue jays, scrub jays, they brought them to me, and I raised them.”

By the time he was a teenager, he was sewing his own clothes, learning to tan leather and taking backpacking trips in the Sierras with his dogs while wearing a full buckskin suit of his own creation. He began apprenticing with a local taxidermist in high school, and then chose to work for him full time through college.

Bovard was always set on his life path, though when he visited friends at college parties, he asked them to stop mentioning what he did instead of going to class, noticing that it gave some people the creeps.

Bovard, still exuberant and energetic at 72, is the last full-time taxidermist at any museum in the United States. He still lives in Claremont, now with his wife, two dogs and “10 and a half cats” (the “half” cat lives mostly outdoors) and wakes most days at 4:30 a.m. to commute to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where he has worked since 1984. He is responsible for maintaining animal mounts the museum has kept in its collection for more than a century, reworking dioramas that could look more true to life and designing new exhibits.

In past generations, museums dispatched hunting expeditions to acquire their animal collections, but Bovard works only with donations from zoos or offerings from private collections. As when he was a child, roadkill is another option.

Once the skin is on and the glue is dry, he sews the pelt together, hiding his seams.

“Mammal stitching has to be pretty tight,” he said, especially for lions or zebras. “Now, a bear with long hair? It doesn’t matter so much. For birds, feathers cover it all.”

The care and keeping of these forms is a responsibility he takes both seriously and joyfully. Frequently, he skips his commute entirely and sleeps in his office, rolling out a blanket between filing cabinets that carry the records of every animal in the museum’s 111-year-old collection and the “fleshing wheel” he uses to gently remove tissue from hides.

“It wouldn’t be for everybody,” he said with a smile. “But I am known to be slightly different. That’s putting it sort of mildly.”

In fact, he has slept at work for weeks at a time, like when he was revamping the museum’s lion diorama and wanted to adjust furry skin folds and feline facial expressions every few hours during the night as the glue set.

Unlike many taxidermists, Bovard is responsible not only for the animals on display in the museum but also for very element of the dioramas, including every tree, leaf, twig, flower, dusting of snow and body of water. He’s made hundreds of thousands of leaves through a method called vacuum forming — a manufacturing technique where plastic is heated and then shaped around a mold using suction — using leaf molds he created himself from plant matter he harvested on research trips.

To do this exacting work, he has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. He knows, for example, that one key to designing a lifelike raptor is the hooding over the eyes. But he also knows the posture that raptor would take sitting on a tree branch, what kind of tree it would be sitting in, the patterns in which it would have preened its feathers, what kind of prey it might be looking for and how its presence would most likely affect the behavior of every other animal in its radius.

For a restaging of a lion family, he wanted two lionesses to be nuzzling foreheads, the standard greeting in big cats, to capture their sociality. He wanted to create more of a sense of dynamic movement in the scene of jaguars perched atop a box canyon in Sonora, Mexico, for example, by adding some small mammal prey, like javelinas, leaping away from the cats.

“It’s all about directing the eye,” he said, pointing toward the far corner of the painted background.

And then there are all the routine tasks, the things he’ll never stop doing, at least not until he retires, like dusting the museum’s pride of lions, vacuuming elephant ears and polishing all the glass eyes.

When asked about whether retirement is on the horizon, he laughed. He was still sleeping on his office floor as recently as New Years. There’s an orangutan he wants to mount this year, and tens of thousands more leaves to make. “No plans to retire.”