Anil Ananthaswamy has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Through Two Doors at Once.
Through Two Doors at Once
Summary
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 Audio
The Man Who Wasn't There
Summary
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, here is a tour of the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard's syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other disorders - revealing the awesome power of the human sense of self, from a master of science journalism. Anil Ananthaswamy's extensive, in-depth interviews venture into the lives of individuals who offer perspectives that will change how you think about who you are. These individuals all lost some part of what we think of as our self, but they then offer remarkable, sometimes heart-wrenching insights into what remains. One man cut off his own leg. Another became one with the universe. We are learning about the self at a level of detail that Descartes ("I think therefore I am") could never have imagined. Recent research into Alzheimer's illuminates how memory creates your narrative self by using the same part of your brain for your past as for your future. But wait, those afflicted with Cotard's syndrome think they are already dead; in a way they believe that "I think therefore I am not." Who - or what - can say that? Neuroscience has identified specific regions of the brain that, when they misfire, can cause the self to move back and forth between the body and a doppelganger or to leave the body entirely. So where in the brain or mind or body is the self actually located? As Ananthaswamy elegantly reports, neuroscientists themselves now see that the elusive sense of self is both everywhere and nowhere in the human brain.
©2015 Anil Ananthaswamy (P)2015 Penguin Audio
Do No Harm: The People Who Amputate Their Perfectly Healthy Limbs, and the Doctors Who Help Them
Summary
All his life, David has been afflicted by a strange and uncomfortable feeling: that his leg belongs to somebody else. It's left him angst-ridden, depressed and confused - and after years of torment, the only way he can think to is to get rid of it completely. David isn't alone. In fact, thousands of people worldwide have the same compulsion to remove their own limbs, or other body parts, and now scientists think they may have identified why. But as researchers unearth the deep neurological roots of the condition, those who have already been driven towards the edge are seeking radical treatment from a few unorthodox surgeons. In this disturbing, award-winning investigation from the science and technology publisher MATTER, acclaimed writer Anil Ananthaswamy delves accompanies one man as he travels the world to get the illicit surgery he craves. Join him on a journey that reveals what it's like to be at war with your own body.
©2012 MATTER Publishing Inc (P)2013 MATTER Publishing Inc
The Edge of Physics
Summary
In this deeply original book, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy sets out in search of the telescopes and detectors that promise to answer the biggest questions in modern cosmology. Why is the universe expanding at an ever faster rate? What is the nature of the "dark matter" that makes up almost a quarter of the universe? Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life? Are there others besides our own?Ananthaswamy soon finds himself at the ends of the earth in remote and sometimes dangerous places. Take the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, one of the coldest, driest places on the planet, where not even a blade of grass can survive. Its spectacularly clear skies and dry atmosphere allow astronomers to gather brilliant images of galaxies billions of light-years away. Ananthaswamy takes us inside the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope on Mount Paranal, where four massive domes open to the sky each night "like dragons waking up." He also takes us deep inside an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota, where half-mile-thick rock shields physicists as they hunt for elusive dark matter particles. And to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, where engineers are drilling 1.5 miles into the clearest ice on the planet. They're building the world's largest neutrino detector, which could finally help reconcile quantum physics with Einstein's theory of general relativity.The stories of the people who work at these and other dramatic research sites, from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the Indian Astronomical Observatory in the Himalayas to the subterranean lair of the Large Hadron Collider make for a compelling new portrait of the universe and our quest to understand it. An atmospheric, engaging, and illuminating read, The Edge of Physics depicts science as a human process, bringing cosmology back down to earth in the most vivid terms.
©2010 Anil Ananthaswamy (P)2010 Audible, Inc.