What do you think?
Rate this book
Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta
Accessible and essential coverage of today's challenging, speculative, cutting-edge science from Quanta Magazine.
These stories reveal the latest efforts to untangle the mysteries of the universe. Bringing together the best and most interesting science stories appearing in Quanta Magazine over the past five years, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire reports on some of the greatest scientific minds as they test the limits of human knowledge. Quanta, under editor-in-chief Thomas Lin, is the only popular publication that offers in-depth coverage of today's challenging, speculative, cutting-edge science. It communicates science by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves.
In the title story, Alice and Bob--beloved characters of various thought experiments in physics--grapple with gravitational forces, possible spaghettification, and a massive wall of fire as Alice jumps into a black hole. Another story considers whether the universe is impossible, in light of experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider. We learn about quantum reality and the mystery of quantum entanglement; explore the source of time's arrow; and witness a eureka moment when a quantum physicist exclaims: "Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room." We reflect on humans' enormous skulls and the Brain Boom; consider the evolutionary benefits of loneliness; peel back the layers of the newest artificial-intelligence algorithms; follow the "battle for the heart and soul of physics"; and mourn the disappearance of the "diphoton bump," revealed to be a statistical fluctuation rather than a revolutionary new particle. These stories from Quanta give us a front-row seat to scientific discovery.
Contributors
Philip Ball, K. C. Cole, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Dan Falk, Courtney Humphries, Ferris Jabr, Katia Moskvitch, George Musser, Michael Nielsen, Jennifer Ouellette, John Pavlus, Emily Singer, Andreas von Bubnoff, Frank Wilczek, Natalie Wolchover, Carl Zimmer
These stories reveal the latest efforts to untangle the mysteries of the universe. Bringing together the best and most interesting science stories appearing in Quanta Magazine over the past five years, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire reports on some of the greatest scientific minds as they test the limits of human knowledge. Quanta, under editor-in-chief Thomas Lin, is the only popular publication that offers in-depth coverage of today's challenging, speculative, cutting-edge science. It communicates science by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves.
In the title story, Alice and Bob--beloved characters of various thought experiments in physics--grapple with gravitational forces, possible spaghettification, and a massive wall of fire as Alice jumps into a black hole. Another story considers whether the universe is impossible, in light of experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider. We learn about quantum reality and the mystery of quantum entanglement; explore the source of time's arrow; and witness a eureka moment when a quantum physicist exclaims: "Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room." We reflect on humans' enormous skulls and the Brain Boom; consider the evolutionary benefits of loneliness; peel back the layers of the newest artificial-intelligence algorithms; follow the "battle for the heart and soul of physics"; and mourn the disappearance of the "diphoton bump," revealed to be a statistical fluctuation rather than a revolutionary new particle. These stories from Quanta give us a front-row seat to scientific discovery.
Contributors
Philip Ball, K. C. Cole, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Dan Falk, Courtney Humphries, Ferris Jabr, Katia Moskvitch, George Musser, Michael Nielsen, Jennifer Ouellette, John Pavlus, Emily Singer, Andreas von Bubnoff, Frank Wilczek, Natalie Wolchover, Carl Zimmer
328 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2018
246 people are currently reading
2852 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Lin
2 books81 followersThomas Lin is the founding publisher of Quanta Books. From 2012 to 2024, he was the founding editor-in-chief of Quanta Magazine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning publication that reports on developments in science and mathematics, with content syndicated in Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American and The Washington Post. Lin previously worked at The New York Times, where he edited online features and wrote about science, technology and tennis. He has also written for Quanta, The New Yorker, Tennis, and other publications.
Book ratings: 5 stars = must read; 4 stars = recommended; 3 stars = worth taking a look if you're interested in the topic.
Book ratings: 5 stars = must read; 4 stars = recommended; 3 stars = worth taking a look if you're interested in the topic.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
February 13, 2019
This book contains a considerable amount of good (and interesting) science - but, for me, it's not a good science book. A book should have structure and flow, leading the reader through its narrative. This is a collection of articles (from the website Quanta). As a result, what we've got here is a magazine in book's clothing. And at that it's not a very good magazine.
What do we look for in a science magazine? Good illustrations, for one. Even a top-level science magazine such as Nature has plenty of illustrations and graphics. Here there are none. Also we want a smorgasbord of interesting articles - the origin of the term 'magazine' is a storehouse - the editor's job is to ensure variety and range, so even if one article isn't really to your taste, the next one will be something completely different. Here, the articles are grouped in topics, and are often quite similar within the topic - many even have quotes from the same handful of scientists over and over again.
Take the first section, which surely should be one designed to whet the appetite. Titled 'Why doesn't our universe make sense?', these articles are all what I'd call fantasy physics. As the book's title suggests, they obsess over purely theoretical concepts like black hole firewalls. There is no observational or experimental evidence for black hole firewalls. They are simply the result of playing mathematical games - which is fine for mathematicians, but shouldn't really be presented as science when there is no prospect of taking a close look at a black hole in the foreseeable future. Every single one of the seven articles in this section is concerned with mathematical or philosophical considerations (such as 'naturalness') which are arguably not really science at all. There is a lot of discussion in the physics world at the moment about the validity of this kind of work - but none of it surfaces here.
Another section I struggled with was one labelled 'How do machines learn?' This was about AI and was very gung-ho about artificial intelligence, giving us hardly anything about the problems it raises and the concerns that it is being overhyped, reflected so well in books such as Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Search for Real AI and The AI Delusion.
The sections I found most interesting were those on biology - 'What is Life?' and 'What Makes us Human?' There was a time when physicists could deservedly be snide about biology, culminating in Rutherford's famous 'stamp collecting' put down. Yet these biology sections felt far more like real science than the physics ones. The articles were excellent and there seemed far more that was generally interesting here. (And I say this as someone with a physics background.)
In the end, I'm not sure that collecting together the 'best' articles (if the first section were the best physics articles, I'd hate to see the worst) from a website makes for a particularly useful book. By all means visit Quanta and read the articles there (they even have illustrations!) - it's a great resource. But the book doesn't do it for me.
What do we look for in a science magazine? Good illustrations, for one. Even a top-level science magazine such as Nature has plenty of illustrations and graphics. Here there are none. Also we want a smorgasbord of interesting articles - the origin of the term 'magazine' is a storehouse - the editor's job is to ensure variety and range, so even if one article isn't really to your taste, the next one will be something completely different. Here, the articles are grouped in topics, and are often quite similar within the topic - many even have quotes from the same handful of scientists over and over again.
Take the first section, which surely should be one designed to whet the appetite. Titled 'Why doesn't our universe make sense?', these articles are all what I'd call fantasy physics. As the book's title suggests, they obsess over purely theoretical concepts like black hole firewalls. There is no observational or experimental evidence for black hole firewalls. They are simply the result of playing mathematical games - which is fine for mathematicians, but shouldn't really be presented as science when there is no prospect of taking a close look at a black hole in the foreseeable future. Every single one of the seven articles in this section is concerned with mathematical or philosophical considerations (such as 'naturalness') which are arguably not really science at all. There is a lot of discussion in the physics world at the moment about the validity of this kind of work - but none of it surfaces here.
Another section I struggled with was one labelled 'How do machines learn?' This was about AI and was very gung-ho about artificial intelligence, giving us hardly anything about the problems it raises and the concerns that it is being overhyped, reflected so well in books such as Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Search for Real AI and The AI Delusion.
The sections I found most interesting were those on biology - 'What is Life?' and 'What Makes us Human?' There was a time when physicists could deservedly be snide about biology, culminating in Rutherford's famous 'stamp collecting' put down. Yet these biology sections felt far more like real science than the physics ones. The articles were excellent and there seemed far more that was generally interesting here. (And I say this as someone with a physics background.)
In the end, I'm not sure that collecting together the 'best' articles (if the first section were the best physics articles, I'd hate to see the worst) from a website makes for a particularly useful book. By all means visit Quanta and read the articles there (they even have illustrations!) - it's a great resource. But the book doesn't do it for me.
October 30, 2019
This book was too dense for audio, so I'll have to track down a print version at some point. The material is fascinating.
June 20, 2025
Don't let the title fool you. This is a serious, well-written book expounding some of the most fascinating ideas being thrown around in modern science at the moment. And that makes it worth going through even if you don't grasp or agree with every single topic of discussion mentioned herein.
December 4, 2020
A collection of articles does not make a book, and most certainly not a book on esoteric physics' topics. Many individual chapters are good Quanta articles on the website, particularly with more visuals and illustrations. However, they are far worse in a book without the power of those accouterments.
The articles also suffer from unevenness. Some of this is due to the widely varying subject matters (not all subjects are equally understandable) and writing styles, while the rest could be because of the differing reader interests in different topics.
The article length nature of each chapter causes other issues. Almost all the chapters suffer from an utter lack of conclusions. This is the nature of scientific research where everything is ongoing forever towards an ever-higher level of understanding but is more visible when one reads journal articles than popular books. The latter focuses more on imparting an established body of knowledge than expounding on the continuing research projects.
Quanta is a great magazine. The reviewer would recommend a weekly journey to its website to anyone interested in the progress of sciences. This book gives a good insight into the types of articles one would find every week in Quanta, but it does not truly do justice to how brilliant the magazine is.
The articles also suffer from unevenness. Some of this is due to the widely varying subject matters (not all subjects are equally understandable) and writing styles, while the rest could be because of the differing reader interests in different topics.
The article length nature of each chapter causes other issues. Almost all the chapters suffer from an utter lack of conclusions. This is the nature of scientific research where everything is ongoing forever towards an ever-higher level of understanding but is more visible when one reads journal articles than popular books. The latter focuses more on imparting an established body of knowledge than expounding on the continuing research projects.
Quanta is a great magazine. The reviewer would recommend a weekly journey to its website to anyone interested in the progress of sciences. This book gives a good insight into the types of articles one would find every week in Quanta, but it does not truly do justice to how brilliant the magazine is.
June 11, 2019
Excellent, but too short
These essays are great, but as a book, the material is somewhat sparse. I'm sure Quanta has much more on these topics.
These essays are great, but as a book, the material is somewhat sparse. I'm sure Quanta has much more on these topics.
May 1, 2020
Quanta Magazine and the Simons Institute are organizations that bring me a lot of enrichment, far more than any other two media organizations that I interact with regularly. This book is a collection of articles from Quanta Magazine, which is funded by the Simons Institute.
Quanta's articles can be put in two categories, the sciences that have to do with mathematics and everything else. This book falls under the everything else category. The articles are less about education, which can only truly come from studying these fields directly, and more about peeking. It's like reading spoilers for a novel or show you didn't quite know you wanted to watch. Sometimes you learn something that makes you dig deeper. There's no academic pretense of citation, although the people involved are talked about, it's more conversational. This is a powerful difference from how most academic research is often discussed. Being able to weave a narrative around these important ideas so it's more palpable is what sets this apart, and why you should stop reading this review. Go pick up a copy of this book.
The audiobook is wonderful and reads as a podcast series. More magazines/non-fiction authors should embrace this format as we're all busy people.
Quanta's articles can be put in two categories, the sciences that have to do with mathematics and everything else. This book falls under the everything else category. The articles are less about education, which can only truly come from studying these fields directly, and more about peeking. It's like reading spoilers for a novel or show you didn't quite know you wanted to watch. Sometimes you learn something that makes you dig deeper. There's no academic pretense of citation, although the people involved are talked about, it's more conversational. This is a powerful difference from how most academic research is often discussed. Being able to weave a narrative around these important ideas so it's more palpable is what sets this apart, and why you should stop reading this review. Go pick up a copy of this book.
The audiobook is wonderful and reads as a podcast series. More magazines/non-fiction authors should embrace this format as we're all busy people.
January 15, 2019
Great way to stay updated
I am an armchair,wannabe scientist. I found this book/series of articles to be a good update on the current research and thought. The book was broken down well and very well organized. For the most part the writing and language was very approachable. I would recommend this to anyone with interest in the roads that scientific development is traveling.
I am an armchair,wannabe scientist. I found this book/series of articles to be a good update on the current research and thought. The book was broken down well and very well organized. For the most part the writing and language was very approachable. I would recommend this to anyone with interest in the roads that scientific development is traveling.
August 29, 2021
When I was twelve I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I read everything I could on the subject, and my librarian, Mrs. Darcy, even made an exception to library policy to let me check out the physics and astronomy volumes of the Popular Science Encyclopedia. To my knowledge, I remain the only student ever allowed to check out reference materials. On the other hand, I'm not sure any other students ever tried. I was an unabashed nerd.
Fast forward twenty years, and, spoiler, I did not become an astrophysicist. The reason is not that I became any less nerdy, but rather because of a long process of disillusionment over the course of my middle and high school years. Math and science, as we teach them in the United States today, are EXCEEDINGLY BORING. Classes are defined by rote memorization, endless repetition, mind-mindbogglingly mundane "real world application" exercises, and exactly zero imagination of any sort. I not only gave up pursuing math or science, I came to viscerally hate them.
I don't know how we got to this place in American education where nerdy twelve-year-olds are driven to emotional revulsion by what would otherwise be their greatest obsession, but I suspect that our short-sighted policy focus on low-level skill development is driven by economic anxiety: investing in developing the more intangible virtues of curiosity and creativity seems irresponsible when the downside risk could mean unemployment, homelessness, and loss of health insurance.
Luckily, although I lost my love of math and science, I never lost the questions about the universe that fueled this love in the first place. I simply studied philosophy instead. Through college, I developed my skills with formal logic, delved into ontology and epistemology, and homed in on cutting-edge ideas coming out of philosophy of mind. It was this experience, paired with college-level math courses that were actually worth a damn, that finally brought me full circle back to science, particularly neuroscience. And it feels good to be back.
Quanta is a treasure. Science reporting that doesn't dumb down its content or rely on sensationalist claims is a breath of fresh air in a world overrun with the memeification of information. Rather than shying away from complexity, uncertainty, and unanswered questions, Quanta embraces them. This is where all big ideas thrive and where starry-eyed dreamers like me are inspired by the challenge of the unknown.
Quanta also displays the true virtues of science in a time when increasing politicization risks degrading objective pursuit of truth. The distinguishing value of science lies not in its ability to produce certainty -- all religions and political ideologies produce claims of certainty -- but rather its embrace of uncertainty. Science is built on the central idea that we might be wrong about the world... so we shoud go try to find out to the very best of our ability. It's a fundamentally humble pursuit, which comes through in all of Quanta's writing.
Hearkening back to an earlier time, Plato, then Aristotle, once wrote that "wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and all philosophy begins in wonder." Books like Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire fill me with the kind of wonder that fuels intellectual exploration. I hope works like this, full of slow thoughtfulness and integrity, can bring this feeling of wonder to a new generation.
Fast forward twenty years, and, spoiler, I did not become an astrophysicist. The reason is not that I became any less nerdy, but rather because of a long process of disillusionment over the course of my middle and high school years. Math and science, as we teach them in the United States today, are EXCEEDINGLY BORING. Classes are defined by rote memorization, endless repetition, mind-mindbogglingly mundane "real world application" exercises, and exactly zero imagination of any sort. I not only gave up pursuing math or science, I came to viscerally hate them.
I don't know how we got to this place in American education where nerdy twelve-year-olds are driven to emotional revulsion by what would otherwise be their greatest obsession, but I suspect that our short-sighted policy focus on low-level skill development is driven by economic anxiety: investing in developing the more intangible virtues of curiosity and creativity seems irresponsible when the downside risk could mean unemployment, homelessness, and loss of health insurance.
Luckily, although I lost my love of math and science, I never lost the questions about the universe that fueled this love in the first place. I simply studied philosophy instead. Through college, I developed my skills with formal logic, delved into ontology and epistemology, and homed in on cutting-edge ideas coming out of philosophy of mind. It was this experience, paired with college-level math courses that were actually worth a damn, that finally brought me full circle back to science, particularly neuroscience. And it feels good to be back.
Quanta is a treasure. Science reporting that doesn't dumb down its content or rely on sensationalist claims is a breath of fresh air in a world overrun with the memeification of information. Rather than shying away from complexity, uncertainty, and unanswered questions, Quanta embraces them. This is where all big ideas thrive and where starry-eyed dreamers like me are inspired by the challenge of the unknown.
Quanta also displays the true virtues of science in a time when increasing politicization risks degrading objective pursuit of truth. The distinguishing value of science lies not in its ability to produce certainty -- all religions and political ideologies produce claims of certainty -- but rather its embrace of uncertainty. Science is built on the central idea that we might be wrong about the world... so we shoud go try to find out to the very best of our ability. It's a fundamentally humble pursuit, which comes through in all of Quanta's writing.
Hearkening back to an earlier time, Plato, then Aristotle, once wrote that "wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and all philosophy begins in wonder." Books like Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire fill me with the kind of wonder that fuels intellectual exploration. I hope works like this, full of slow thoughtfulness and integrity, can bring this feeling of wonder to a new generation.
November 29, 2022
Let's be frank, most of the time the science is entirely over my head, but very much enjoyably so.
A very good book to realize how much of the proven physics of our world is very, very old by now. And how much of the "accepted knowledge" of the last 50 years is suddenly being doubted. Like with results from CERN not lining up with the standard model and supersymmetry in a natural manner. It suddenly seems we know very little at all about the way things really are and lots of breakthrough new science ahead.
Great stuff if you like being perplexed in a controlled and systematic manner.
A very good book to realize how much of the proven physics of our world is very, very old by now. And how much of the "accepted knowledge" of the last 50 years is suddenly being doubted. Like with results from CERN not lining up with the standard model and supersymmetry in a natural manner. It suddenly seems we know very little at all about the way things really are and lots of breakthrough new science ahead.
Great stuff if you like being perplexed in a controlled and systematic manner.
August 11, 2023
This is a collection of science journalism articles from the mid twenty teens. As such, it shouldn't be given a hard time for going stale. Science progresses. I think the most interesting and (relatively) evergreen theme was the debate between the physicists who hold to the "naturalness principle" (physics should be elegant) and those who don't. I would have liked to hear a more diverse range of scientists. We tended to get the same ones over and over. In all, I think I prefer PBS spacetime.
November 28, 2021
My wife knows I'm quite fond of Quanta Magazine, so she got me this collection of their writings as a gift. Just as the cover says, it presents some of the "biggest ideas in science" grouped under 8 questions:
1) Why doesn't our universe make sense?
2) What is quantum reality, really?
3) What is time?
4) What is life?
5) What makes us human?
6) How do machines learn?
7) How will we learn more?
8) Where do we go from here?
This is accessible, entertaining writing for the lay public, but it's not dumbed down and deals with some pretty heady concepts. The collection consists of 4-6 pg intros or brief forays into specific questions/conundrums rather than anything one would consider comprehensive. From the continuing challenge of getting gravity and quantum mechanics to play nicely together to multiverses, eternal inflation, amplituhedrons, and the necessity of loneliness, there's enough here to origami fold your grey matter several times over.
Natalie Wolchover's "A New Physics Theory of Life" particularly blew my mind and the field of neuroeconomics seems like it could be exploited to immense human detriment. A central trend in both science and culture seems to be less certainty---a steady trajectory towards probabilities and likelihoods, as opposed to exactitude and definitive answers.
----------------------------------------
WAY TOO MANY TERMS & CONCEPTS TO LOOK UP
Alice & Bob | adiabatic | Einstein-Rosen bridges | AMPS paper | tensor networks | soliton | anyons | amplituhedron | neuroeconomics | Calabi-Yau manifold | quantum gravity
---------------------------------------
SOME CHOICE QUOTES TO LIFT YOUR SPIRITS OR THOSE OF YOUR FRIENDS
"Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium." -Natalie Wolchova
"Eventually all the universe will be reduced to a uniform, boring jumble: a state of equilibrium, wherein entropy is maximized and nothing meaningful will ever happen again." -Philip Ball
"The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows." -Philip Ball
"The trash heap of history is littered with beautiful theories." -Natalie Wolchova
1) Why doesn't our universe make sense?
2) What is quantum reality, really?
3) What is time?
4) What is life?
5) What makes us human?
6) How do machines learn?
7) How will we learn more?
8) Where do we go from here?
This is accessible, entertaining writing for the lay public, but it's not dumbed down and deals with some pretty heady concepts. The collection consists of 4-6 pg intros or brief forays into specific questions/conundrums rather than anything one would consider comprehensive. From the continuing challenge of getting gravity and quantum mechanics to play nicely together to multiverses, eternal inflation, amplituhedrons, and the necessity of loneliness, there's enough here to origami fold your grey matter several times over.
Natalie Wolchover's "A New Physics Theory of Life" particularly blew my mind and the field of neuroeconomics seems like it could be exploited to immense human detriment. A central trend in both science and culture seems to be less certainty---a steady trajectory towards probabilities and likelihoods, as opposed to exactitude and definitive answers.
----------------------------------------
WAY TOO MANY TERMS & CONCEPTS TO LOOK UP
Alice & Bob | adiabatic | Einstein-Rosen bridges | AMPS paper | tensor networks | soliton | anyons | amplituhedron | neuroeconomics | Calabi-Yau manifold | quantum gravity
---------------------------------------
SOME CHOICE QUOTES TO LIFT YOUR SPIRITS OR THOSE OF YOUR FRIENDS
"Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium." -Natalie Wolchova
"Eventually all the universe will be reduced to a uniform, boring jumble: a state of equilibrium, wherein entropy is maximized and nothing meaningful will ever happen again." -Philip Ball
"The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows." -Philip Ball
"The trash heap of history is littered with beautiful theories." -Natalie Wolchova
February 22, 2020
This book falls under a unique area where a science content is not compromised but it is appealing to a curious person. I'll admit some time or a lot of time I did not understand terms, details or puns but it did not stop me from appreciating the beauty of the content. Science people will have a greater appreciation for it but I believe everyone should read it. You should gift this book right and left.
April 8, 2019
Relative Reality Breaksdown
At the extreme edge of science lies the untestable, like string theory or the multiverse. Are these scientific principles? This is just one of the many questions tackled in this book. An anthology of the latest work in science; from the delightful to the disturbing, it's all delightful.
At the extreme edge of science lies the untestable, like string theory or the multiverse. Are these scientific principles? This is just one of the many questions tackled in this book. An anthology of the latest work in science; from the delightful to the disturbing, it's all delightful.
July 29, 2019
3.5/5.0
August 11, 2019
Just an amazing collection of well....the best science magazine out there...
July 16, 2025
Tired of those long strings of thoughts coming from your face at the least opportune of moments. Try Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta. All the strings of thoughts are there in one Schrödinger of a place, regardless of when you were supposed to have asked for them. Covering you like a beard, but for your entire mind, body, and brain. The whole flesh lab is covered. And look at all these scientists, heroes, lab mice, and villains with their sense of humor about it. Paying their billiards. Just look at Riley Pinkerton or Joff von Minskalot. All from MIT or Harvard, or some other country way off in the distance. Look at the ice cream studies and the dopes who once thought it was bad for brain cells. Look at all these particles we can smash together now. It's like a giant play pen without any adults around to stop us, am I right?
June 14, 2020
The science magazines I subscribe to are Quanta and Scientific American. Of those two, Quanta most consistently focuses on theoretical developments in hard sciences (esp. physics). It also covers mathematics far better than SciAm. So I was excited when this Quanta anthology came out.
This book is a collection of the most ground-breaking and thought-provoking articles published in Quanta magazine from 2013 to 2018. Topics range from quantum physics to molecular biology to artificial intelligence. If any of those are your cup of tea, or you just enjoy good science journalism, then this book will float your boat.
This book is a collection of the most ground-breaking and thought-provoking articles published in Quanta magazine from 2013 to 2018. Topics range from quantum physics to molecular biology to artificial intelligence. If any of those are your cup of tea, or you just enjoy good science journalism, then this book will float your boat.
January 23, 2021
A nice selection of articles. If reading this review a decade from now (2021), assume the articles are dated, and drop this rating to 4 stars.
November 26, 2019
Wonderfully presented for the general public with interest in science. Even though did not grasp everything and some places it takes time to digest, it is a delight to listen/read the book.
December 3, 2019
Absolutely wonderful book for those curious about what’s going on in physics and other sciences these days. The book is edited wonderfully, presenting ideas that raise questions, only to delve deeper and answer them in the following article or segway into the next section.
Thoroughly enjoyable and insightful. I would recommended to anyone who has high school understanding of science and is open to learning more!
Thoroughly enjoyable and insightful. I would recommended to anyone who has high school understanding of science and is open to learning more!
December 30, 2020
An avid reader of Quanta Magazine, I was eager to read this book when I found out about it - and it did not disappoint. A beautifully interwoven selection of Quanta articles covering physics, biology, and machine learning, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire was a fantastic read. It is clear that the writers at Quanta not only thoroughly researched their articles, but really understood the material they were working with. The writers delivered conceptually difficult topics with sheer elegance, distinctive styles, and the occasional humor. I personally enjoyed the articles devoted to physics most, as it explored the arrow of time, quantum entanglement, the fabric of the universe, and more in even deeper ways than I was already accustomed to. If you’re interested in picking up this book, get ready for an intense but rewarding reading experience! Hope you enjoy :)
August 9, 2021
2.5/5
I think this book deserves a higher mark than that, but unfortunately, I am scientifically illiterate. While I have an interest in big concepts like time and entropy, I don't actually have the background knowledge to make the science sound real. This book is not friendly to the layperson, and I really had to focus my attention and critical thinking skills to scrape by. Even though many of the articles were doing their best to strip back the layers, the concepts were challenging for me to grasp.
Great book, but I was too dumb to appreciate it. maybe I'll come back around and try this after I read some physics for beginners.
I think this book deserves a higher mark than that, but unfortunately, I am scientifically illiterate. While I have an interest in big concepts like time and entropy, I don't actually have the background knowledge to make the science sound real. This book is not friendly to the layperson, and I really had to focus my attention and critical thinking skills to scrape by. Even though many of the articles were doing their best to strip back the layers, the concepts were challenging for me to grasp.
Great book, but I was too dumb to appreciate it. maybe I'll come back around and try this after I read some physics for beginners.
January 2, 2019
I am a regular reader of Quanta, and I appreciated this compilation of recent and relevant articles on scientific developments. Well, except the machine learning sections, but that’s only because I consider that more technology than natural science. For those that don’t read Quanta, I recommend that you do :)
September 21, 2020
The best physics (and science more generally) outreach book I have read over the last years.
The only drawback is the small amount of illustrations (which are plenty in the magazine edition).
Waiting for the second edition when it comes. ;)
The only drawback is the small amount of illustrations (which are plenty in the magazine edition).
Waiting for the second edition when it comes. ;)
January 7, 2024
This book is a series of essays that attempt to portray many of the ideas that are currently at at the forefront of scientific research. The essays often center on the work of specific scientists, introduce new terms and concepts, and include many quotations from the primary researchers. An excellent aspect of these articles is that they include the ideas and quotations from researchers questioning the work.
I-1 Is Nature Unnatural?
Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. The cosmological constant has to be enormously fine-tuned to prevent the universe from rapidly exploding or collapsing to a point, and the Higgs mass is not explained by current theories.
I-2 Alice And Bob Meet The Wall Of Fire
A new theory has it that if an object were to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, it would be met with a wall of fire. The theory raises a number of issues around quantum entanglement.
I-3 Wormholes Untangle A Black Hole Paradox
The ER = EPR conjecture suggests that particles inside and outside of a black hole are entangled, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties in current theories associated with particles passing through the event horizon.
I-4 How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time
Brian Swingle, who said “Entanglement is the fabric of space-time”, uses tensor networks to provide an understanding of how entanglement is distributed. The networks demonstrate how a single geometric structure can
emerge from complicated interactions between many objects. Jacob Bekenstein showed that information about a black hole’s interior is encoded in its two dimensional surface area (the “boundary”) rather than within its three dimensional volume (the “bulk”). Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft extended this notion to the entire universe, likening it to a hologram. Curved spacetimes emerge quite naturally from entanglement in tensor networks via holography.
I-5 In A Multiverse, What Are The Odds?
Proponents of the multiverse idea must show that among the rare universes that support life, ours is statistically typical. In an eternally inflating multiverse, where any bubble that can form does so infinitely many times, how do you measure “typical”?
I-6 Multiverse Collisions May Dot The Sky
Cosmologists contemplate a scenario called eternal inflation, where individual regions of space stop inflating and become “bubble universes” like the one in which we live. It is possible that another bubble universe has collided with ours in the past, leaving a signature.
I-7 How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space
Even the vacuum of space contains energy in the form of quantum fluctuations, virtual particles or zero-point motion. This is the dark energy, or the cosmological constant, which represents about 70
percent of the total mass in the universe. It is still not known how the various fields result in the known value for density of dark energy.
II-1 A Jewel At The Heart Of Quantum Physics
Quantum physical interactions have been calculated through the use of Feynman diagrams which produce expressions with thousands of terms. It has been discovered that a geometric form called the "amplituhedron" can simplify these calculations greatly. It is unclear whether this method will provide further understanding of the underlying physics.
II-2 New Support For Alternative Quantum View
Support is increasing for David Bohm's pilot-wave theory (Bohmian mechanics). While the Copenhagen view requires one to believe that a particle has no position until measured and the “many worlds” view requires an infinite number of universes, the Bohmian view is that particles and their velocities at any moment are fully determined by the pilot wave, which in turn depends on the wave function. The pilot wave theory states that the trajectory of any one particle depends on what all the other particles described by the same wave function are doing. As the wave function has no spatial limits, nonlocality is inherent in the theory.
II-3 Entanglement Made Simple
Frank Wilczek describes quantum entanglement, starting with familiar physical objects. He notes that "quantum theory forces us to be circumspect in assigning physical reality to individual properties", noting that a property that is not measured need not exist, and measurement is an active process that alters the system being measured.
II-4 Quantum Theory Rebuilt From Simple Physical Principles
Some scientists are engaged in trying to rebuild quantum mechanics from scratch from a minimal set of axioms. One approach, based on information theory, holds that systems should be able to encode information about
each other, and that every process should in principle be reversible, so that information is conserved.
III-1 Time’s Arrow Traced To Quantum Source
Physicists are now thinking that the arrow of time is due to quantum entanglement, an idea proposed by Seth Lloyd about 35 years ago. It is the loss of information through quantum entanglement that drives entropy. The nature of time is still unknown.
III-2 Quantum Weirdness Now A Matter Of Time
Proposals have been made that quantum correlations are more fundamental than space-time, and space-time itself is somehow built up from these correlations. Particles can be entangled through space, but also over time.
III-3 A Debate Over The Physics Of Time
The "past hypothesis" is that entropy increases because the Big Bang happened to produce an exceptionally low-entropy universe. The “block universe” sees the universe as a static block of space-time in which any flow of time must be a mental construct. Other models include the “evolving block universe” model where space-time itself is growing as time passes, and the "causal set theory" where the universe is made up of elementary units of space-time at the Planck scale and new space-time atoms are continuously coming into existence.
IV-1 A New Physics Theory Of Life
Jeremy England has proposed a mathematical formula that indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy, like the sun, and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
IV-2 How Life (And Death) Spring From Disorder
Scientists have been trying to understand the physics underlying the process of natural selection. Erwin Schrödinger said that living organisms feed on “negative entropy”, by capturing and storing information. Wolpert and Kolchinsky theorized that it is information that helps the organism stay out of equilibrium because it can then tailor its behavior to extract work from fluctuations in its surroundings. Landauer set an absolute lower limit on the amount of energy a finite-memory computation requires: the energetic cost of forgetting. It is estimated that the thermodynamic efficiency of the total computation done by a cell is that it is only 10 or so times more than the Landauer limit. There is a thermodynamic cost to storing information about the past that has no predictive value for the future. It is possible that aging is governed by the thermodynamics of information in that an organism has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these defects that arise in its cells.
IV-3 In Newly Created Life-Form, A Major Mystery
Craig Venter has created a minimal organism - syn3.0 with just 473 genes - in an attempt to understand what the smallest set of genes is required for life. However, it is still not clear what many of the genes do.
IV-4 Breakthrough DNA Editor Born Of Bacteria
While CRISPR has become a powerful tool used for editing DNA, it's origin is with bacteria. CRISPR's are DNA fragments used by bacteria to destroy DNA from bacteriophage infections. They use the CRISPR's to create Cas enzymes which chop the bacteriophage DNA in two, preventing the virus from replicating. Research into the origins of CRISPR show an evolving competition between microbes and viruses.
IV-5 New Letters Added To The Genetic Alphabet
Steven Benner has created an improved DNA with six rather than four chemical letters, the additions termed P and Z. While normal DNA encodes 20 amino acids, Benner's DNA could encode 216. He wants to create an
alternative genetic system in which proteins are unnecessary.
IV-6 The Surprising Origins Of Life’S Complexity
Some argue that life has a built-in tendency to become more complex over time, while others maintain that as random mutations arise, complexity emerges as a side effect, McShea and Brandon see complexity increasing even in the absence of natural selection. Michael Gray of Dalhousie University in Halifax has proposed that “constructive neutral evolution” can allow neutral mutations to cause complexity increase without natural selection. He has shown that fungi have evolved a more complex piece of ATP machinery apparently without evolving intermediate forms.
IV-7 Ancient Survivors Could Redefine Sex
Bdelloid rotifers have two very different copies of their genes with much foreign DNA present. As they propagate sexuality, there is much debate on the need for sexual reproduction to generate diversity.
IV-8 Did Neurons Evolve Twice?
Comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from other animals. Some feel the the ctenophores were the earliest branch of animals and evolved their nervous system separately.
V-1 How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains
Starting around 3 million years ago the hominin brain began a massive expansion, increasing in size from about 350 grams to more than 1,300 grams by the time that Homo sapiens emerged. The human brain is also unique in its unsurpassed gluttony - although the human brain makes up only 2 percent of body weight, the human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest. Various studies are working to identify the mechanisms that support this difference.
V-2 New Evidence For The Necessity Of Loneliness
John Cacioppo has proposed that there is a mechanism in social animals whereby loneliness drives individuals to seek out companionship. Stimulation of the dorsal raphe nucleus in the brain has been shown to drive isolated mice to seek friends.
V-3 How Neanderthal DNA Helps Humanity
Certain Neanderthal and Denisovan genes seem to have swept through the modern human population, suggesting that these genes brought great advantage to their bearers. Tibetans, living at the high altitude of 14,000 feet, have an adaptation that reduces the number of red blood cells to prevent higher rates of miscarriage, blood clots and stroke. It appears that Tibetans likely acquired the unusual DNA sequence from the Denisovans. Neanderthal DNA is most closely linked to genes for skin pigmentation, hair growth and immune system changes. People carrying one of the Neanderthal variants are less likely to be infected with H. pylori, a microbe that causes ulcers, but more likely to suffer from common allergies such as hay fever.
V-4 The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions
Paul Glimcher argues that humans often make sub-optimal decisions because the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits. In the concept of divisive normalization, he proposes that neurons can send more efficient messages if they encode in their sequence of spikes only the relative differences among the choices, represented by their firing rate.
V-5 Infant Brains Reveal How The Mind Gets Built
Rebecca Saxe has been studying her son's brain activity by spending time with him in an MRI machine. This work, which included eight other infants, showed evidence that young infants will look longer at faces than other things. Adults have a harder time discriminating between two faces when they’re upside down, a difference that appears only after about four months.
VI-1 Is Alphago Really Such A Big Deal?
AlphaGo has beat the world's best Go player. It incorporates a valuation system that captures something very similar to a good Go player’s intuition about the value of different board positions.
VI-2 New Theory Cracks Open The Black Box Of Deep Learning
Researchers are exploring a number of ideas as to why deep learning systems work, including the possibility that a network deals with noisy input data by squeezing the information through a bottleneck. My favorite statement in the book: 'When Schwab and Mehta applied the deep belief net to a model of a magnet at its “critical point,” where the system is fractal, or self-similar at every scale, they found that the network automatically used the renormalization-like procedure to discover the model’s state.'
VI-3 A Brain Built From Atomic Switches Can Learn
Engineering researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California have built chips with networks of silver wires that seem to mimic the synapses of the brain. They have trained their network to solve a T-maze, and are working toward further learning applications.
VI-4 Clever Machines Learn How To Be Curious
Work is being done to incorporate intrinsic motivation and artificial curiosity into AI systems. It is thought that this may allow systems to figure out tasks that had not been specifically programmed.
VII-1 Gravitational Waves Discovered At Long Last
Gravitational waves were reported in February 2016 by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The scientists measured changes in the four kilometre arms of two L-shaped detectors tiny as one thousandth the width of a proton.
VII-2 Colliding Black Holes Tell New Story Of Stars
The event, labeled GW150914, that was detected by LIGO was the merger of two massive black holes that were each around 30 solar masses in size. The prevailing theory of how such black holes merge, the common-envelope theory, did not fit this event well. A newer chemically homogeneous model seems to work well for this event.
VII-3 Neutron-Star Collision Shakes Space-Time And Lights Up The Sky
In 2017, the LIGO detected a collision between two neutron stars. It was established that neutron star collisions are a cause of gamma ray bursts. There was strong evidence that neutron star collisions produce much of the universe’s supply of heavy elements. Calculations indicate that this single collision produced an amount of gold greater than the weight of the Earth.
VIII-1 What No New Particles Means For Physics
Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started running in 2009, physicists have found no particles that could comprise dark matter, no siblings or cousins of the Higgs boson, no sign of extra dimensions, no leptoquarks, nor any supersymmetry particles that would round out equations and satisfy the “naturalness” principle about how the laws of nature ought to work. Supersymmetry would have resolved the fact that the Higgs boson has a highly unnatural seeming mass. The lack of expected particles suggests that the theory of supersymmetry is incorrect.
VIII-2 To Solve The Biggest Mystery In Physics, Join Two Kinds Of Law
On reductionism, where closer viewpoints reveal new components, and emergence, where examination of larger entities reveals new processes.
VIII-3 The Strange Second Life Of String Theory
Many physicists had believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. However, David Gross said “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.”
VIII-4 A Fight For The Soul Of Science
At present, there is no way of testing string theory, making many question whether, being unfalsible, it is really science. String theorists, though, are convinced as it is logically compelling and has been the only theory that has successfully provided a quantum theory of gravity. Richard Dawid argues that nonempirical evidence can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data, a process he calls Bayesianism,
I-1 Is Nature Unnatural?
Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. The cosmological constant has to be enormously fine-tuned to prevent the universe from rapidly exploding or collapsing to a point, and the Higgs mass is not explained by current theories.
I-2 Alice And Bob Meet The Wall Of Fire
A new theory has it that if an object were to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, it would be met with a wall of fire. The theory raises a number of issues around quantum entanglement.
I-3 Wormholes Untangle A Black Hole Paradox
The ER = EPR conjecture suggests that particles inside and outside of a black hole are entangled, thereby overcoming some of the difficulties in current theories associated with particles passing through the event horizon.
I-4 How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time
Brian Swingle, who said “Entanglement is the fabric of space-time”, uses tensor networks to provide an understanding of how entanglement is distributed. The networks demonstrate how a single geometric structure can
emerge from complicated interactions between many objects. Jacob Bekenstein showed that information about a black hole’s interior is encoded in its two dimensional surface area (the “boundary”) rather than within its three dimensional volume (the “bulk”). Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft extended this notion to the entire universe, likening it to a hologram. Curved spacetimes emerge quite naturally from entanglement in tensor networks via holography.
I-5 In A Multiverse, What Are The Odds?
Proponents of the multiverse idea must show that among the rare universes that support life, ours is statistically typical. In an eternally inflating multiverse, where any bubble that can form does so infinitely many times, how do you measure “typical”?
I-6 Multiverse Collisions May Dot The Sky
Cosmologists contemplate a scenario called eternal inflation, where individual regions of space stop inflating and become “bubble universes” like the one in which we live. It is possible that another bubble universe has collided with ours in the past, leaving a signature.
I-7 How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space
Even the vacuum of space contains energy in the form of quantum fluctuations, virtual particles or zero-point motion. This is the dark energy, or the cosmological constant, which represents about 70
percent of the total mass in the universe. It is still not known how the various fields result in the known value for density of dark energy.
II-1 A Jewel At The Heart Of Quantum Physics
Quantum physical interactions have been calculated through the use of Feynman diagrams which produce expressions with thousands of terms. It has been discovered that a geometric form called the "amplituhedron" can simplify these calculations greatly. It is unclear whether this method will provide further understanding of the underlying physics.
II-2 New Support For Alternative Quantum View
Support is increasing for David Bohm's pilot-wave theory (Bohmian mechanics). While the Copenhagen view requires one to believe that a particle has no position until measured and the “many worlds” view requires an infinite number of universes, the Bohmian view is that particles and their velocities at any moment are fully determined by the pilot wave, which in turn depends on the wave function. The pilot wave theory states that the trajectory of any one particle depends on what all the other particles described by the same wave function are doing. As the wave function has no spatial limits, nonlocality is inherent in the theory.
II-3 Entanglement Made Simple
Frank Wilczek describes quantum entanglement, starting with familiar physical objects. He notes that "quantum theory forces us to be circumspect in assigning physical reality to individual properties", noting that a property that is not measured need not exist, and measurement is an active process that alters the system being measured.
II-4 Quantum Theory Rebuilt From Simple Physical Principles
Some scientists are engaged in trying to rebuild quantum mechanics from scratch from a minimal set of axioms. One approach, based on information theory, holds that systems should be able to encode information about
each other, and that every process should in principle be reversible, so that information is conserved.
III-1 Time’s Arrow Traced To Quantum Source
Physicists are now thinking that the arrow of time is due to quantum entanglement, an idea proposed by Seth Lloyd about 35 years ago. It is the loss of information through quantum entanglement that drives entropy. The nature of time is still unknown.
III-2 Quantum Weirdness Now A Matter Of Time
Proposals have been made that quantum correlations are more fundamental than space-time, and space-time itself is somehow built up from these correlations. Particles can be entangled through space, but also over time.
III-3 A Debate Over The Physics Of Time
The "past hypothesis" is that entropy increases because the Big Bang happened to produce an exceptionally low-entropy universe. The “block universe” sees the universe as a static block of space-time in which any flow of time must be a mental construct. Other models include the “evolving block universe” model where space-time itself is growing as time passes, and the "causal set theory" where the universe is made up of elementary units of space-time at the Planck scale and new space-time atoms are continuously coming into existence.
IV-1 A New Physics Theory Of Life
Jeremy England has proposed a mathematical formula that indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy, like the sun, and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
IV-2 How Life (And Death) Spring From Disorder
Scientists have been trying to understand the physics underlying the process of natural selection. Erwin Schrödinger said that living organisms feed on “negative entropy”, by capturing and storing information. Wolpert and Kolchinsky theorized that it is information that helps the organism stay out of equilibrium because it can then tailor its behavior to extract work from fluctuations in its surroundings. Landauer set an absolute lower limit on the amount of energy a finite-memory computation requires: the energetic cost of forgetting. It is estimated that the thermodynamic efficiency of the total computation done by a cell is that it is only 10 or so times more than the Landauer limit. There is a thermodynamic cost to storing information about the past that has no predictive value for the future. It is possible that aging is governed by the thermodynamics of information in that an organism has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these defects that arise in its cells.
IV-3 In Newly Created Life-Form, A Major Mystery
Craig Venter has created a minimal organism - syn3.0 with just 473 genes - in an attempt to understand what the smallest set of genes is required for life. However, it is still not clear what many of the genes do.
IV-4 Breakthrough DNA Editor Born Of Bacteria
While CRISPR has become a powerful tool used for editing DNA, it's origin is with bacteria. CRISPR's are DNA fragments used by bacteria to destroy DNA from bacteriophage infections. They use the CRISPR's to create Cas enzymes which chop the bacteriophage DNA in two, preventing the virus from replicating. Research into the origins of CRISPR show an evolving competition between microbes and viruses.
IV-5 New Letters Added To The Genetic Alphabet
Steven Benner has created an improved DNA with six rather than four chemical letters, the additions termed P and Z. While normal DNA encodes 20 amino acids, Benner's DNA could encode 216. He wants to create an
alternative genetic system in which proteins are unnecessary.
IV-6 The Surprising Origins Of Life’S Complexity
Some argue that life has a built-in tendency to become more complex over time, while others maintain that as random mutations arise, complexity emerges as a side effect, McShea and Brandon see complexity increasing even in the absence of natural selection. Michael Gray of Dalhousie University in Halifax has proposed that “constructive neutral evolution” can allow neutral mutations to cause complexity increase without natural selection. He has shown that fungi have evolved a more complex piece of ATP machinery apparently without evolving intermediate forms.
IV-7 Ancient Survivors Could Redefine Sex
Bdelloid rotifers have two very different copies of their genes with much foreign DNA present. As they propagate sexuality, there is much debate on the need for sexual reproduction to generate diversity.
IV-8 Did Neurons Evolve Twice?
Comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from other animals. Some feel the the ctenophores were the earliest branch of animals and evolved their nervous system separately.
V-1 How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains
Starting around 3 million years ago the hominin brain began a massive expansion, increasing in size from about 350 grams to more than 1,300 grams by the time that Homo sapiens emerged. The human brain is also unique in its unsurpassed gluttony - although the human brain makes up only 2 percent of body weight, the human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest. Various studies are working to identify the mechanisms that support this difference.
V-2 New Evidence For The Necessity Of Loneliness
John Cacioppo has proposed that there is a mechanism in social animals whereby loneliness drives individuals to seek out companionship. Stimulation of the dorsal raphe nucleus in the brain has been shown to drive isolated mice to seek friends.
V-3 How Neanderthal DNA Helps Humanity
Certain Neanderthal and Denisovan genes seem to have swept through the modern human population, suggesting that these genes brought great advantage to their bearers. Tibetans, living at the high altitude of 14,000 feet, have an adaptation that reduces the number of red blood cells to prevent higher rates of miscarriage, blood clots and stroke. It appears that Tibetans likely acquired the unusual DNA sequence from the Denisovans. Neanderthal DNA is most closely linked to genes for skin pigmentation, hair growth and immune system changes. People carrying one of the Neanderthal variants are less likely to be infected with H. pylori, a microbe that causes ulcers, but more likely to suffer from common allergies such as hay fever.
V-4 The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions
Paul Glimcher argues that humans often make sub-optimal decisions because the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits. In the concept of divisive normalization, he proposes that neurons can send more efficient messages if they encode in their sequence of spikes only the relative differences among the choices, represented by their firing rate.
V-5 Infant Brains Reveal How The Mind Gets Built
Rebecca Saxe has been studying her son's brain activity by spending time with him in an MRI machine. This work, which included eight other infants, showed evidence that young infants will look longer at faces than other things. Adults have a harder time discriminating between two faces when they’re upside down, a difference that appears only after about four months.
VI-1 Is Alphago Really Such A Big Deal?
AlphaGo has beat the world's best Go player. It incorporates a valuation system that captures something very similar to a good Go player’s intuition about the value of different board positions.
VI-2 New Theory Cracks Open The Black Box Of Deep Learning
Researchers are exploring a number of ideas as to why deep learning systems work, including the possibility that a network deals with noisy input data by squeezing the information through a bottleneck. My favorite statement in the book: 'When Schwab and Mehta applied the deep belief net to a model of a magnet at its “critical point,” where the system is fractal, or self-similar at every scale, they found that the network automatically used the renormalization-like procedure to discover the model’s state.'
VI-3 A Brain Built From Atomic Switches Can Learn
Engineering researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California have built chips with networks of silver wires that seem to mimic the synapses of the brain. They have trained their network to solve a T-maze, and are working toward further learning applications.
VI-4 Clever Machines Learn How To Be Curious
Work is being done to incorporate intrinsic motivation and artificial curiosity into AI systems. It is thought that this may allow systems to figure out tasks that had not been specifically programmed.
VII-1 Gravitational Waves Discovered At Long Last
Gravitational waves were reported in February 2016 by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The scientists measured changes in the four kilometre arms of two L-shaped detectors tiny as one thousandth the width of a proton.
VII-2 Colliding Black Holes Tell New Story Of Stars
The event, labeled GW150914, that was detected by LIGO was the merger of two massive black holes that were each around 30 solar masses in size. The prevailing theory of how such black holes merge, the common-envelope theory, did not fit this event well. A newer chemically homogeneous model seems to work well for this event.
VII-3 Neutron-Star Collision Shakes Space-Time And Lights Up The Sky
In 2017, the LIGO detected a collision between two neutron stars. It was established that neutron star collisions are a cause of gamma ray bursts. There was strong evidence that neutron star collisions produce much of the universe’s supply of heavy elements. Calculations indicate that this single collision produced an amount of gold greater than the weight of the Earth.
VIII-1 What No New Particles Means For Physics
Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started running in 2009, physicists have found no particles that could comprise dark matter, no siblings or cousins of the Higgs boson, no sign of extra dimensions, no leptoquarks, nor any supersymmetry particles that would round out equations and satisfy the “naturalness” principle about how the laws of nature ought to work. Supersymmetry would have resolved the fact that the Higgs boson has a highly unnatural seeming mass. The lack of expected particles suggests that the theory of supersymmetry is incorrect.
VIII-2 To Solve The Biggest Mystery In Physics, Join Two Kinds Of Law
On reductionism, where closer viewpoints reveal new components, and emergence, where examination of larger entities reveals new processes.
VIII-3 The Strange Second Life Of String Theory
Many physicists had believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. However, David Gross said “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.”
VIII-4 A Fight For The Soul Of Science
At present, there is no way of testing string theory, making many question whether, being unfalsible, it is really science. String theorists, though, are convinced as it is logically compelling and has been the only theory that has successfully provided a quantum theory of gravity. Richard Dawid argues that nonempirical evidence can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data, a process he calls Bayesianism,
June 12, 2020
This a great collection of journal articles that explain recent studies in physics, machine learning, and biology. If you what to know what's happened in science in recent years and would be glad to read intuitive and approachable explanations then this is the book you are looking for. Here are my notes for some parts of the book:
The chapter about the origins of our world and quantum mechanics
This is an interesting collection of articles about cutting-edge physics from Quanta magazine. The best part of this book is that it presents you with alternative views on popular theories in physics. For example, one article talks about the pilot-wave theory that states that a quantum particle can be measured exactly and simultaneously in time and space. That contradicts more popular Copenhagen interpretation, which states that you can’t reliably recover the trajectory of a quantum particle. This shows us that particle physics is far from complete, and event the most popular schools of thought are subject to change in the future. There is nothing wrong with finding quantum events confusing because there are many ways to look at them and we are not yet sure which theories will prove themselves true.
For example, QBism takes a Bayesian perspective and applies it to classical quantum theory. In this view, the world isn’t bound by rules—or at least, not by quantum rules. Indeed, there may be no fundamental laws governing the way particles interact; instead, laws emerge at the scale of our observations. It would mean that “quantum theory is merely a tool to make comprehensible a lawless slicing-up of nature”.
The chapter about life
A very interesting idea about the origin of life: if you will while light on a bunch of atoms for long enough it will organize itself to consume the energy and transform it in a less focused way. All living organisms operate exactly in this way. We transform external energy into more scattered forms to keep our internal organization (low entropy). As a result, the overall entropy of the world around us increases.
> In his 1944 book What is Life? the physicist Erwin Schrödinger expressed this by saying that living organisms feed on “negative entropy.”
Another interesting fact is that scientists also notice that simply storing information about the surrounding environment isn’t enough for a living organism to, ahem, live. To succeed, it must store this information selectively and **predict** what while happen next based on its immediate surroundings. Thus, the phenomena of life are tied to **prediction**. According to this view, living organisms can be viewed as thermodynamical prediction machines.
Chapters explaining where we will go next
Interesting thoughts about what next steps the scientists could take and how they will acquire knowledge. I once had a dispute with my colleague about quantum mechanics. I thought that quantum behavior might not be real. I think, that it might be a look through the peephole at a vastly more complex scenario that not completely describes how quantum particles behave. I liked that many physicians in this book express the same views. We are still not sure about many things, and even practically working theories might be incomplete.
A lot of the chapters were going through how the string theory influenced modern physics.
The chapter about the origins of our world and quantum mechanics
This is an interesting collection of articles about cutting-edge physics from Quanta magazine. The best part of this book is that it presents you with alternative views on popular theories in physics. For example, one article talks about the pilot-wave theory that states that a quantum particle can be measured exactly and simultaneously in time and space. That contradicts more popular Copenhagen interpretation, which states that you can’t reliably recover the trajectory of a quantum particle. This shows us that particle physics is far from complete, and event the most popular schools of thought are subject to change in the future. There is nothing wrong with finding quantum events confusing because there are many ways to look at them and we are not yet sure which theories will prove themselves true.
For example, QBism takes a Bayesian perspective and applies it to classical quantum theory. In this view, the world isn’t bound by rules—or at least, not by quantum rules. Indeed, there may be no fundamental laws governing the way particles interact; instead, laws emerge at the scale of our observations. It would mean that “quantum theory is merely a tool to make comprehensible a lawless slicing-up of nature”.
The chapter about life
A very interesting idea about the origin of life: if you will while light on a bunch of atoms for long enough it will organize itself to consume the energy and transform it in a less focused way. All living organisms operate exactly in this way. We transform external energy into more scattered forms to keep our internal organization (low entropy). As a result, the overall entropy of the world around us increases.
> In his 1944 book What is Life? the physicist Erwin Schrödinger expressed this by saying that living organisms feed on “negative entropy.”
Another interesting fact is that scientists also notice that simply storing information about the surrounding environment isn’t enough for a living organism to, ahem, live. To succeed, it must store this information selectively and **predict** what while happen next based on its immediate surroundings. Thus, the phenomena of life are tied to **prediction**. According to this view, living organisms can be viewed as thermodynamical prediction machines.
Chapters explaining where we will go next
Interesting thoughts about what next steps the scientists could take and how they will acquire knowledge. I once had a dispute with my colleague about quantum mechanics. I thought that quantum behavior might not be real. I think, that it might be a look through the peephole at a vastly more complex scenario that not completely describes how quantum particles behave. I liked that many physicians in this book express the same views. We are still not sure about many things, and even practically working theories might be incomplete.
A lot of the chapters were going through how the string theory influenced modern physics.
October 2, 2025
It's effectively an ad for Quanta magazine, showcasing some good articles on different science topics. And they are good. Either dealing with cutting edge findings or discussing the state of the field (string physics gets a returning role for physics, often as a whipping boy) - but the articles also presuppose a higher degree of knowledge going into them than most popsci, and as a collection there's no real throughline, not even within each subject. Which of course makes sense given the origin, but 'as a book' it leaves something to be desired, even as an essay collection of sorts the voice and direction has no real consistency.
Also, aren't we doing all this with science podcasts now? Including repeatedly cited foreword writer Sean Carroll's podcast?
Alternative: Aside from podcasts, maybe The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion and The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself?
Also, aren't we doing all this with science podcasts now? Including repeatedly cited foreword writer Sean Carroll's podcast?
Alternative: Aside from podcasts, maybe The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion and The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself?
November 28, 2020
The articles that comprise this book generally stick to a very high-level synopsis of the topics in question so as not to overwhelm the lay reader with too much technical detail, which is understandable given how advanced and unfamiliar the material is for most people. In some cases that led to a frustrating lack of specifics, to the point where I didn’t feel like I was gaining any real knowledge of the research being described. I was also surprised at the shortage of graphics, which would have been a very helpful tool to access the more abstract subjects covered and therefore stuck out as a notable omission for this type of popular book. Other pieces, such as those on biology and astronomy, were more intuitive and easier to grasp. All in all, it was an inspiring glimpse at the cutting edge of modern science that managed to stoke my curiosity even further.
November 2, 2019
Physics, Quantum Physics, Time, Biology, Learning / AI; a bunch of short articles from the Quanta Magazine.
Most were a little light on details, these were not deep dives into narrow subjects, but more overviews of items on the leading edge. I was hoping for more details.
Either prepared for recreational science aficionados, or more likely written by grad students working on science-journalism degrees?
Good but not great.
Most were a little light on details, these were not deep dives into narrow subjects, but more overviews of items on the leading edge. I was hoping for more details.
Either prepared for recreational science aficionados, or more likely written by grad students working on science-journalism degrees?
Good but not great.
December 16, 2021
This book reports on many recent advances in science. It was worth reading. However, the explanations are very high level. The authors do not assume the reader has any background in science. To really understand any of these advances, you'd have to use other resources. So in summary I'd say that this book serves the purpose of informing you that recent progress has been made, and perhaps inspiring you to follow up through additional reading elsewhere.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews