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

Thomas M. Corwin, Dale Wachowiak

Tushna Commissariat

In Through Two Doors at Once: the Elegant Experiment that Captures the Enigma of Quantum Reality , author Anil Ananthaswamy dives into the 200-year history, science and legacy of the double-slit experiment, which forms the backbone of quantum mechanics.

Anil Ananthaswamy

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 the greatest scientific minds have grappled with this experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton's view that light is made of particles. But then Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles. Quantum mechanics was born. This led to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality--subatomic bits of matter and its interaction with light--again as revealed by the double-slit experiment. Richard Feynman held that it 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, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality, as the textbook "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics seems to suggest? How can particles influence each other faster than the speed of light? 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?Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.

Jozef Gruska, Ferdinand Peper

F. Selleri

Graham P. Smetham

Quantum Bayesianism or QBism is a new approach to quantum interpretation which offers a radically subjectivist and pan-experientialist account of the functioning of quantum ‘reality’ and the emergence of the ‘classical’ world. In a recent collection of essays Elegance and Enigma: The Quantum Interviews there is a debate between one of the supporters of the QBism paradigm, C. A. Fuchs, and the instigator of ‘quantum Darwinism’, W. Zurek, as to the viability of such a radically subjectivist position. Zurek suggests that the ‘many worlds’ interpretation and the QBism perspectives are extreme views and his perspective steers a ‘middle way’ between the two. In this article I show that an almost identical metaphysical debate occurred in fourteenth and fifteenth Tibetan Buddhism concerning the nature of ultimate reality. The two debates are examined, contrasted and the conclusion that it may be the case that quantum reality may be describable in differing complementary and interrelated ways is drawn.