
Through Two Doors at Once
The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality
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Narrated by:
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René Ruiz
About this listen
One of Smithsonian's favorite books of 2018.
One of Forbes' 2018 best books about astronomy, physics, and mathematics.
One of Kirkus' best books of 2018.
The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself - and continues to almost 200 years later.
Many of science's greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive "double-slit" experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton. Nearly a century later, Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles, and the experiment became key to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe.
How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle exist before we look at it, or does the very act of looking create reality? Are there hidden aspects to reality missing from the orthodox view of quantum physics? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit?
With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. Through Two Doors at Once is the most fantastic voyage you can take.
©2018 Anil Ananthaswamy (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“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)
"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)
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Story
You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of them could be made without the essential component of emotion. It has long been held that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as is rational thinking.
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Widely misleading
- By Kevin Richardson on 01-30-22
By: Leonard Mlodinow
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The Story of More
- How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
- By: Hope Jahren
- Narrated by: Hope Jahren
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.
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Like Al Gore, stuck on the problem
- By Eleanor B. Hildreth on 06-04-20
By: Hope Jahren
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Galileo's Error
- Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra", beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved.
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Good but basic
- By ginger on 01-23-20
By: Philip Goff
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"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
- The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
- By: Florian Huber
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.
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This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks to understand how ordinary people could be transformed into monsters.
- By Anonymous User on 05-08-20
By: Florian Huber
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Mirrors in the Earth
- Reflections on Self-Healing from the Living World
- By: Asia Suler
- Narrated by: Asia Suler
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A nature therapy session for the soul—encounter the benevolence of the living world through 12 essays on the Earth-healing powers of self-compassion and empathy.
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amazing feel good book!
- By April on 04-01-25
By: Asia Suler
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Reality Is Not What It Seems
- The Journey to Quantum Gravity
- By: Carlo Rovelli, Simon Carnell - translator, Erica Segre - translator
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times best-selling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Helgoland, a closer look at the mind-bending nature of the Universe. What are the elementary ingredients of the world? Do time and space exist? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his life exploring these questions. He tells us how our understanding of reality has changed over the centuries and how physicists think about the structure of the Universe today.
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Most compelling physics book in at least 10 years!
- By Kyle on 02-03-17
By: Carlo Rovelli, and others
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Where the Water Goes
- Life and Death Along the Colorado River
- By: David Owen
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes listeners on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the US-Mexico border where the river runs dry.
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Water issues are never about only water.
- By Bonny on 08-20-17
By: David Owen
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Survival of the Friendliest
- Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
- By: Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened?
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Good but Unfortunate
- By Dee Faram on 09-07-20
By: Brian Hare, and others
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Orwell's Roses
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions.
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Absolutely Awful!
- By asdf on 04-06-22
By: Rebecca Solnit
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Power Metal
- The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
- By: Vince Beiser
- Narrated by: Vince Beiser
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of “green power” and digital technology–that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage.
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Misleading title
- By O. D. S on 11-21-24
By: Vince Beiser
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The Universe in a Box
- Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos
- By: Andrew Pontzen
- Narrated by: Andrew Pontzen
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Universe in a Box, cosmologist Andrew Pontzen explains how physicists model the universe’s most exotic phenomena, from black holes and colliding galaxies to dark matter and quantum entanglement, enabling them to study the evolution of virtual worlds and to shed new light on our reality.
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makes me wanna specialize in weak emergence and simulations
- By Logan Jones on 06-17-24
By: Andrew Pontzen
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Diagnosis
- Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries
- By: Lisa Sanders
- Narrated by: Lisa Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the New York Times best-selling author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama, House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all. And yet, she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians struggle to diagnose. Dr. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck.
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Repetitive from her previous work
- By anon on 03-08-21
By: Lisa Sanders
With as much of the universe's energy and matter not observable, it seems Einstein had a point in suggesting quantum mechanics would be drawn back into a "cause and effect" world. As recent as this week, the activity of muons in dark energy suggests there is more to the story of the predictability of life.
LIFE'S MEANING
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At the end I'm left even more convinced that this is the "holiest" holy grail in all of science(even more so than any t.o.e)...the bedrock principle of the universe, and the ultimate nut to crack.
Worth more than one listen!
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Great history
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The author refers to the same basic experimental setup for each new story (interference of wave-particle paths), and makes it into somewhat of a joke for repeating the same thing for each new story; but really this book has much more breadth than its title suggests. He gives great explanations for just about all types of interference relevant to quantum mechanics, and weaves into each story a lot of great background info on the philosophy of the physics and the physicists involved.
I was literally in tears by the end of this audible (not literally), that's how good it was!
Great explanations, far exceeded my expectations..
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Wonderful performance
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History of quantum physics with a thought provoking ending
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Compelling and beautiful
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It's a strong historical overview and lays out the various theories and interpretations without speaking to correctness of any given viable theories.
Approachable, excellent overview!
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I'm in admiration of Anil's writing. He does not have to be the originator of all the ideas discussed to be applauded - his communication of state of play is brilliantly clear. I'm not buying the smart idea that "the interpretation doesn't matter". Saying that measurement brings reality in to being has uncomfortably little to say about what is there when you're not looking.
This is an entertaining and informative book.
Excellent exposition of the conundrum
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Excellent overview of interpreting QM
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