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As for why he wanted to write about his outsider status, he says its precisely because physics has all those unresolved questions. For example: How does gravity work? Dark matter appears to account for most of the stuff in the universe, but what is it? Whats inside the singularity of a black hole? What is consciousness? As Alexander sees it, his field might be getting stuck on subjects like these because it needs more people with diverse backgrounds and interests who are likelier to challenge long-standing assumptions and look at things in new ways.

Who will be the next Einstein of this new frontier? he says. Does the fear of failure, the mysterious, the invisible, the ignored, the stigmatized things often associated with Blackness prevent us from unlocking the secrets of the universe?

This interview with Alexander has been condensed and edited.

In the book you argue that physics should be more receptive to ideas from other disciplines, even from ones that are considered unscientific, like the religious traditions. But you also describe intriguing scientific explorations happening now into some far-out concepts such as nonlocal consciousness which holds, among other things, that even inanimate matter can have something akin to an inner life or awareness. So is the pendulum possibly swinging in the direction youd like to see, with more openness to ideas that would have been dismissed 20, 30 years ago?

What you ask is a hard question. But just from my experience, there has been a shift in the pendulum, because when I was a graduate student, I was a laughingstock.

My first year, all the grad students, we shared this one office and we had to go through a hazing you have to take all these exams and youre all working on problems together in the same room, all 18 of us. And thats where people size up against each other: Whos the smart one, whos the dumb one, who got the lowest score on the exams, whos going to work with the top person, whatever. And they wrote me off as being the dumb guy, because they found these books that I was reading, including Roger Penroses books. [Penrose is a physicist who has contended for decades that consciousness arises from the weird principles of quantum mechanics playing out in the brain.] They wrote me off [they said] that I do pseudo-physics because they found that I was reading these books about physics and consciousness. Now, dont get me wrong, I was also taking the same physics courses that everybody else was taking, but I definitely had these other questions. I guess there was a side of me that was a philosopher as well and an artist.

Back then, Penrose, as brilliant as he was he got a Nobel Prize last year he was a laughingstock too. Neuroscientists said he was a smart guy in physics and math but didnt know what he was talking about [when it came to the brain]. It was because he was an outsider, he was an interloper. Theres a judgment made that youre not worthy enough to even think about this in this field.

There are other ways these judgments are made. If you are, in my case, presumed to be benefiting from affirmative action that got you into grad school, then you would definitely not be the one that should be working on the hard problems.

Anyway, to make a long story short, a few years ago there was a conference somewhere about consciousness and physics. And everybody and their grandfather wanted to be part of this conference. It became more acceptable to talk about it and work on it. Some leaders in the field who normally would have dismissed it embraced it, and then everybody wants to follow the trend because a leader said so.

How can scientists wall off ideas that couldnt possibly be true, like flat-earth stuff, while remaining open to ones that have a chance of being right?

We need to populate the landscape with scientific ideas and see which ones hold water. But to filter an idea out before you even put it on the table its not good for science.

You write that a huge aspect of getting more ideas on the table is to have scientists come from a greater variety of cultural and intellectual backgrounds.

I mean, if we look at the history of some of the great ideas, including the founders of quantum mechanics, they all dabbled and sought out ideas outside of physics. Like [Erwin] Schroedinger: After he discovers quantum mechanics, after he gets a Nobel, all that stuff, he starts writing about What is life? Some people will get the hall pass to be that way maybe a Richard Feynman [a theoretical physicist known for being an eccentric genius]. And a lot of the judgments made, unfortunately, are based on the biases that people have about African Americans. Somebody thats culturally on the inside can act in the same way that I act and theyll say hes a genius. But me, they might say, He doesnt know his physics.

Is this why you still see yourself as an outsider despite being a tenured professor of physics with a great deal of published work and other high-caliber credentials?

I think of this in the tradition of graffiti artists. For them to continue doing great art, at least in their tradition, they had to deliberately keep one foot on the outside as well as one in the art establishment, the art galleries. John Coltrane was like this too. After mastering everything thats in Western tonal harmony, he started embracing Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders [jazz musicians who pioneered free-form techniques].

That tradition of deliberately keeping one foot on the outside and one foot on the inside: Just being a person of color in these spaces will naturally keep me on the outside. But theres a part of me that embraces it and Im proud of it. My point here is to celebrate that, to encourage it. Its not that Im like, Oh, woe is me, but more like: Hey, here are my hidden strengths, because I dont have to prove anything to anybody to be in their club.

Brian Bergstein can be reached at brian.bergstein@globe.com.

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Q&A: Greater diversity in science could unlock the secrets of the universe - The Boston Globe