Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

by Anil Ananthaswamy

Overview

“Perhaps no political treatise is more important to the development of modern political thought and yet so often misread than Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Claire Grogan’s comprehensively annotated edition of this classic text corrects the problem of decontextualized readings by not only reviving the tumultuous political debates with which Paine engaged, but also by distinguishing the unique style, argument, and overall significance of this revolutionary tract. With a critical yet lively introduction, this edition of Rights of Man is indispensable to anyone interested in understanding the development of 1790s radical thought and its relevance today.” — Juan Luís Sánchez, University of California, Los Angeles

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101986103
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	636,900
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.03(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Rights of Man presents an impassioned defense of the Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality that Thomas Paine believed would soon sweep the world. He boldly claimed, "From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming ... it winds its progress from nation to nation." Though many more sophisticated thinkers argued for the same principles and many people died in the attempt to realize them, no one was better able than Paine to articulate them in a way which fired the hopes and dreams of the common man and actually stirred him to revolutionary political action.

About the Author:
A participant in both the American and French Revolutions and in the governments that first arose from them, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the highly popular pamphleteer whose incendiary Common Sense was largely responsible for motivating the American colonists to declare independence. He was born in England on January 29, 1737, and his impoverished early life offered scant evidence of the qualities that would later elevate him to literary and historical prominence. Taking the first available opportunity to improve his lot, he moved to America in 1775, coincidentally arriving at the time when revolutionary fervor was just taking hold.

Read an Excerpt

"Perhaps no political treatise is more important to the development of modern political thought and yet so often misread than Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Claire Grogan's comprehensively annotated edition of this classic text corrects the problem of decontextualized readings by not only reviving the tumultuous political debates with which Paine engaged, but also by distinguishing the unique style, argument, and overall significance of this revolutionary tract. With a critical yet lively introduction, this edition of Rights of Man is indispensable to anyone interested in understanding the development of 1790s radical thought and its relevance today."

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

The Story of Nature Taunting Us

1 The Case of the Experiment with Two Holes: Richard Feynman Explains the Central Mystery 5

2 What Does It Mean "To Be"?: The Road to Reality, from Copenhagen to Brussels 23

3 Between Reality and Perception: Doing the Double Slit, One Photon at a Time 59

4 From Sacred Texts: Revelations about Spooky Action at a Distance 93

5 To Erase or Not To Erase: Mountaintop Experiments Take Us to the Edge 109

6 Bohmian Rhapsody: Obvious Ontology Evolving the Obvious Way 147

7 Gravity Kills the Quantum Cat?: The Case for Adding Spacetime into the Mix 187

8 Healing an Ugly Scar: The Many Worlds Medicine 217

Epilogue 255

Ways of Looking at the Same Thing?

Notes 267

Acknowledgments 281

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Through Two Doors at Once

“Through Two Doors at Once is a challenging and rewarding survey of how scientists…are grappling with nature’s deepest, strangest secrets.”
—Wall Street Journal

“A fascinating tour through the cutting-edge physics the experiment keeps on spawning.” 
—Scientific American

"“In this book, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy gives an absolutely mind-boggling tour of how quantum physicists try to explain this “reality” that one of the most powerful scientific models of our era.”
—Smithsonian 

"Through Two Doors at Once offers beginners the tools they need to seriously engage with the philosophical questions that likely drew them to quantum mechanics."
—Science

“At a time when popular physics writing so valorizes theory, a quietly welcome strength of Ananthaswamy’s book is how much human construction comes into focus here. This is not “nature” showing us, but us pressing “nature” for answers to our increasingly obsessional questions.”
—Margaret Wertheim, The Washington Post

"Ananthaswamy's book is simply an outstanding exploration of the double slit experiment and what makes it so weird."
—Forbes

"A thrilling survey of the most famous, enduring, and enigmatic experiment in the history of science."
—Kirkus, starred review

"Ananthaswamy deftly describes the science and history of a simple experiment that perplexes physicists to this day."
—Symmetry, Physics Books of 2018

“Following up 2015’s acclaimed The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ananthaswamy treats a 19th-century light experiment as a sprawling intellectual adventure story....This accessible, illuminating book shows that no matter how sophisticated the lab setup, the double-slit experiment still challenges physicists.”
—Publisher's Weekly, Top 10 Science Books for Fall 2018

"An excellent and comprehensive exploration of notable double-slit-like experiments.... A fascinating and readable exploration of quantum mechanics that is a particularly wonderful book for nonspecialists, hobbyists and students of science — you may not be able to put this captivating book down until you’ve finished it."
—Forbes

“An engaging and accessible history of a fascinating and baffling experiment that remains inconclusive to this day. Recommended for those interested in the subject or anyone wishing to delve further into the double-slit experiment.”
—Library Journal

“Through Two Doors at Once is a fascinating read and a must for anyone who would like to find out the latest experimental advances made in this most fundamental of quantum experiments.”
—Physics World

“Ananthaswamy cleverly comes at quantum physics from a different direction…An excellent addition to the 'Quantum physics for the rest of us' shelf.”
—Brian Clegg, author of Are Numbers Real? and The Quantum Age

“Wondrous book.  If I were boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow, Anil Ananthaswamy is the companion I’d want in the Lounge car.  I would buy him a very good Scotch, say ‘Tell me about quantum physics and the scientists who created it,’ and then I’d sit back contentedly for the seven days to Vladivostok, and listen."
—David Quammen, award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo and (forthcoming) The Tangled Tree
 
"Upon opening his two quantum doors, Anil Ananthaswamy invites us into the bizarre and wacky world of nature on the smallest of scales.  An engaging raconteur, he tells us a story that is confounding, disturbing, and yet eminently fascinating.  Ananthaswamy serves as the perfect tour guide to physics' wild side by closely examining one of its most famous experiments."
—Marcia Bartusiak, award-winning author of Einstein's Unfinished Symphony and Dispatches from Planet 3

"Quantum mechanics asks us to believe a number of bizarre things about the nature of reality. But these demands don't arise out of thin air; they are forced on us by experiments. Anil Ananthaswamy has provided a lively introduction to the most paradigmatic of these: the (in)famous double-slit experiment."
—Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture

“The double-slit experiment is among the most important experiments ever conducted, both scientifically and historically. In this brisk and enjoyable book, Anil Ananthaswamy gives the double-slit the biography it has long deserved. Anyone interested in the true nature of our quantum world should read this book.”
—Adam Becker, Ph.D., author of What Is Real?
 
“All the strangeness of the quantum world is revealed as Ananthaswamy skillfully weaves an almost magical tale out of who, what, when, where and the elusive why surrounding modern versions of an experiment first performed over two hundred years ago. A must read for all those interested in the nature of reality.”
—Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum

"Like quantum particles encountering the fabled double slit, physicists have traveled many different paths in trying to parse the beguiling implications of quantum theory. Through Two Doors at Once is a marvelous guide to the leading ideas – and the stakes – in that century-long quest."
—David Kaiser, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics

"The first time I saw the double-slit experiment, I thought it was a trick. Even now that I know it's real, it still seems like magic. In his new book, Anil Ananthaswamy brings alive the magic of quantum mechanics."
—Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and author of Lost in Math

"For a lover of physics and mathematics, there could not have been a better book to explain the complexities of quantum mechanics."
—The Hindustan Times

From the Publisher

06/25/2018
Science writer Ananthaswamy (The Man Who Wasn’t There) guides readers through the odd byways and revelations of one of modern physics’s most groundbreaking experiments. The tale begins some 200 years ago when Thomas Young, a youthful member of the Royal Society of London, challenged Isaac Newton’s assertion that light is made of tiny particles. Young’s experiment—shining light through a barrier with two slits cut into it and a screen beyond—showed the light beams recombined beyond the slits to create a row of alternating bright and dark stripes, or interference fringes, “created when two waves overlap.” But that wasn’t the end of the matter, and the particle versus wave question raised new hackles with the early 20th-century breakthroughs of Albert Einstein and the rise of quantum theory. Over the course of this intellectual journey, Ananthaswamy introduces a fascinating array of ideas, e.g., that quantum mechanics means humans should “give up notions of locality in 3-D space our notions of time too,” and characters, e.g., “quantum cowboy” Marlan Scully, famed for “pioneering research on the nature of reality and beef cattle production.” This accessible, illuminating book shows that no matter how sophisticated the lab setup, the double-slit experiment still challenges physicists. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

It’s difficult to popularize anything involving quantum mechanics, fundamentally counterintuitive as it is in various aspects. Narrator Rene Ruiz grapples with this text in an engaging way, making it as accessible as anyone possibly could. The audiobook itself takes on the task by starting from the perspective of the classic double-slit experiment, in which light photons are sent toward extremely narrow openings in a medium in order to study their wave versus particle behavior. Many confusing observations result. Ruiz’s accent is middle American, and his grasp of scientific jargon is superb. All in all, this is an effective job involving a challenging technical topic. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

It’s difficult to popularize anything involving quantum mechanics, fundamentally counterintuitive as it is in various aspects. Narrator Rene Ruiz grapples with this text in an engaging way, making it as accessible as anyone possibly could. The audiobook itself takes on the task by starting from the perspective of the classic double-slit experiment, in which light photons are sent toward extremely narrow openings in a medium in order to study their wave versus particle behavior. Many confusing observations result. Ruiz’s accent is middle American, and his grasp of scientific jargon is superb. All in all, this is an effective job involving a challenging technical topic. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

★ 2018-05-28
A thrilling survey of the most famous, enduring, and enigmatic experiment in the history of science.First conceived in the early 1800s, the so-called "double-slit experiment" has provided essential clues to the nature of the quantum world. Briefly, the experiment shows that light behaves both as a particle and a wave. The mechanics of this seemingly impossible quantum behavior have confounded every scientist who dared attempt an interpretation—and yet the experiment remains among the most powerful available to physicists and has been reimagined in ways that push our notions of reality to the very edge of belief. In this remarkable telling, Ananthaswamy (The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self, 2015, etc.) traces the experiment as it evolved from a heady thought experiment—famously used by Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg as they grappled with an early understanding of quantum theory—to the pioneering experimentalists who have augmented it to demonstrate never-before-seen quantum properties. If the subject matter sounds intimidating, fear not. The author is a brilliant scientific storyteller, and he makes sense of even the most nonsensical concepts in clear, compelling prose. Combining archival research and first-person interviews, Ananthaswamy deftly navigates both the foundational principles of quantum mechanics and the many iterations of the two-slit experiment with such ease that readers of any scientific acumen can revel in the implications without being bogged down by the math. It is no exaggeration to say that the results yielded by the two-slit experiment are among the most fascinating to ever be recorded, and the author does an exceptional job of conveying their profound effect on our understanding of reality.Once again, Ananthaswamy delivers a book that has all the intrigue of science fiction while remaining rooted in the scientific real, however bizarre. A fantastic book for anyone interested in the quantum and what it reveals about the world around us.

Kirkus Reviews