Anil Ananthaswamy > Quotes

“Memory, connecting inconceivable mystery to inconceivable mystery, performs the impossible by the strength of her divine arms; holds together past and present,—beholding both,—existing in both . . . and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“The subjective emotion we feel is the brain’s best predictive guess that explains the [incoming] interoceptive information at a whole bunch of hierarchical levels,” said Seth. “It’s not just cognition looking down at physiology and interpreting it.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“What gives me the right to speak of an “I,” and even of an “I” as cause, and finally of an “I” as cause of thought? . . . A thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want. —Friedrich Nietzsche For”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“We cannot leave decisions about how AI will be built and deployed solely to its practitioners. If we are to effectively regulate this extremely useful, but disruptive and potentially threatening, technology, another layer of society—educators, politicians, policymakers, science communicators, or even interested consumers of AI—must come to grips with the basics of the mathematics of machine learning.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. —Albert Camus”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“The most practical thing in the world is a good theory,” Hart told me. “If you know the theoretical properties of a procedure, you can have confidence employing that without having the bother of conducting endless experiments to figure out what it does or when it works and when it doesn’t work.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“While the findings remain controversial (partly because there are a few different versions of Bohm’s theory and partly because of the debate over the meaning of weak measurements), for some, including Steinberg, the fact that surreal trajectories have a perfectly sensible explanation makes it possible to think of Bohmian mechanics as a viable alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation. The experiment shows that it cannot be ruled out, yet.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Laurie, too, is well aware that the voices in her head, her paranoia, the messages she thinks she’s receiving from outside, are all, in some sense, a product of her altered self. “But that insight is a paradox. Without the insight you fear the external; with the insight you fear yourself,”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

“The onus of collapsing the wavefunction falls on the measurement device, which is assumed to be some macroscopic, classical apparatus. But the Copenhagen interpretation does not really define the exact meaning of a measurement. How big does the measurement device have to be to count as classical? Where’s the boundary between the quantum and the classical? Such questions lead to the so-called measurement problem.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“He crosshatched the quadrant that involved YES for both. “Nobody would want to do both of them, so cross out that box,” he said. Copenhagen and Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) went into the NO, YES quadrant: they don’t change the physics, but they change the philosophy, because the interpretations are not observer-independent (however you define an observer). Copenhagen does involve a collapse, which is non-Schrödinger evolution, but since it does claim a law for how that happens, one can argue that it does not modify the physics. Bohmian mechanics, GRW, and Penrose’s collapse theory all modify the physics, either by adding hidden variables or by adding new dynamics that interrupt the Schrödinger evolution of a system, causing it to collapse. But they leave the philosophy alone. Everett modifies neither the physics nor the philosophy. “This sounds weird for something as crazy as the Everett interpretation, but the attraction for me is that it’s extremely conservative,” said Wallace.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“The office is simply the most uncluttered of any physicist’s office I have ever seen. There’s a chair alongside a small table, with nothing on it. No books, no papers, no lamp, no computer, nothing. A sofa graces the office. Large windows overlook a small lake,”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“A cartoon captioned “At home with the Heisenbergs” was stuck on the bathroom door outside the apartment, with Mrs. Heisenberg saying, “I can’t find my car keys,” and Mr. Heisenberg replying, “You probably know too much about their momentum.”)”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“That’s because there are other seemingly more pressing and legitimate concerns about the Everettian view. One is about trying to figure out what exactly happens when a universe splits. Say we send a photon through a beam splitter and let each path decohere, resulting in two separate worlds. Does the entire universe split into two everywhere at the same instant (and what does that mean, given that Einstein’s relativity abolished the notion of a universal “now”) or does it start splitting at the point where the decoherence happens near the beam splitter, and move outward at the speed of light? Opinions differ, and there’s no consensus, even among those who are not troubled by the idea of many worlds.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Called the double-slit experiment, it was first done in the early 1800s to challenge Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light. The experiment took center stage again in the early twentieth century, when two of the founders of quantum physics, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, grappled with its revelations about the nature of reality. In the 1960s, Richard Feynman extolled its virtues, saying that the double-slit experiment contained all of the mysteries of the quantum world. A simpler and more elegant experiment would be hard to find, the workings of which a high school student can grasp, yet profound enough in its implications to bewilder brains like Einstein’s and Bohr’s, a confusion that continues to this day.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Gravity-induced collapse of the wavefunction can be seen as one example of a more generalized solution to the measurement problem.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“According to the standard view, the photon has no definite position—the wavefunction is spread out—until there’s a measurement. The measurement at D1 or D2 causes the wavefunction to collapse to one definite value: the photon shows up at one of the detectors.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Similar arguments are also used against those who say that the many worlds interpretation flouts laws of conservation of energy. Where does the energy for the new physical branches come from? Well, all these worlds/universes exist in Hilbert space—not in physical space—so the question is a bit ill posed. Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek has argued, for instance, that “if the other universes are inaccessible, they cannot be sources or sinks of energy.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“the wavefunction at any instant in time is not localized in a region of space; rather, it is spread out, it’s everywhere, and it has imaginary components. The Schrödinger equation, then, allows you to calculate how the state of the quantum system, ψ, changes with time.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Ponder this for a moment. Newborn ducklings, with the briefest of exposure to sensory stimuli, detect patterns in what they see, form abstract notions of similarity/dissimilarity, and then will recognize those abstractions in stimuli they see later and act upon them.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“Bohr, meanwhile, became ever more convinced that what he called the principle of complementarity was at the heart of quantum mechanics: that wave nature and particle nature are complementary aspects of reality, and that it’s our choice of experiment that reveals one or the other, but never both at the same time. He thought that the uncertainty principle was one outcome of the broader principle of complementarity.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“In a couple of seminal papers published in the summer of 1926, Born showed that when electrons collide and scatter, the resulting wavefunction that represents the state of the electrons only encodes the probability of finding the electrons in one state or another.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“If this sounds like the probabilities of matrix mechanics, you are not mistaken. Schrödinger himself, in another stroke of insight, showed that wave mechanics and matrix mechanics are mathematically equivalent (in hindsight, it was a mathematician called John von Neumann who would really prove the equivalence a few years later).”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Our final interpretation—at first called Quantum Bayesianism, but now known as QBism—initially got its name from the Bayes rule of probability (named after an eighteenth-century statistician and theologian, Thomas Bayes). Not only is the issue of probability front and center in QBism, but it brings the observer back into the mix, claims that probabilities are subjective (personal to each observer), and throws up questions about what quantum states (the vectors in Hilbert space) say about objective reality. QBism, “rather than relinquishing the idea of reality . . . [says] that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“He was rather upset when I met him,” Bouwmeester said, speaking at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada. Vaidman, it seems, had been trying to get a patent approved for a watch that would help him make a difficult “yes or no” life decision. The watch would have a single photon source. The photon would go through a beam splitter and be detected by one of two single-photon detectors inside the watch. If one of them clicks, the watch says “YES,” do it; if the other clicks, the watch says “NO,” don’t. Vaidman’s point being that no matter what decision you make, you can rest easy because you know that in another branch of the wavefunction, you have done the opposite.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“As convinced as Penrose is of his idea that gravity must play a role in the collapse of the wavefunction, the response from physicists and philosophers probing the foundations of quantum mechanics has been tepid. It’s probably because he’s proposing modifying quantum mechanics—particularly the way the wavefunction evolves according to the rules of the Schrödinger equation. The gravitationally induced collapse of the wavefunction messes up this rather beautiful picture. But then it does provide an explanation for why there exists a boundary between the quantum and the classical.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Newton was a polymath of considerable renown (as a mathematician, he gave us calculus, and even ventured into chemistry, theology, and writing biblical commentaries, not to mention all his work in physics).”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Soon after Bell published his theorem, experimentalists started testing the inequality. These were not variations of the double-slit experiment, but their findings would have tremendous import for understanding the double slit’s essential mystery. Among the forerunners who did such Bell experiments were, most notably, Stuart Freedman and John Clauser at the University of California, Berkeley, Richard Holt and Francis Pipkin at Harvard University, and Edward Fry and Randall Thompson at Texas A&M University. By 1976, a total of seven such experiments had been done, and while two of these experiments disagreed with quantum mechanics (in that they did not violate the Bell inequality), the consensus was that quantum mechanics was correct. The world, at its most fundamental, seemed nonlocal.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“So, even though orthodox quantum mechanics wins out when it’s pitted against local hidden variable theories, the outcome of a tussle between the orthodoxy and Bohmian mechanics is far from resolved. It has proven impossible to experimentally disprove Bohm’s ideas, because the theory makes exactly the same predictions as orthodox quantum theory.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“Schrödinger’s cat has become code for a macroscopic object that can remain in a superposition of multiple states. For Arndt, the molecules he works with are such objects. While they are certainly nowhere near as big as even the smallest possible cat, with the mass of 10,000 protons, they are the largest macroscopic objects that have thus far been seen in superposition going through a double slit.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

“GRW, as the theory is called, changes the way the wavefunctions of particles evolve. Rather than being completely governed by the Schrödinger equation, GRW adds a component to the dynamics of the wavefunction that causes it to collapse at random. But the collapse is not induced by gravity, à la Diósi-Penrose, or by a measurement, as in the Copenhagen interpretation. Rather, it is something spontaneous, and an elemental aspect of nature. It causes the wavefunction of a particle to go from being spread out to being relatively localized.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality