Anil Ananthaswamy

Why you should listen

Trained as an electrical and computer engineer, Anil Ananthaswamy left a promising career in technology to pursue something more nebulous: writing. His last three books: The Edge of Physics, on cosmology and astrophysics; The Man Who Wasn't There, on the neuroscience of the self; and Through Two Doors at Once, on quantum mechanics, have ostensibly nothing in common. But they do. Ananthaswamy's work examines scientific answers to profound questions such as: How did this universe come to be? What is the nature of quantum reality? Who am I?

Formerly a staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist, Ananthaswamy now writes for many of the world's premier science magazines, including Scientific American, Quanta and Nature, among others. He was a MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow from 2019 to 2020 and has been a journalist-in-residence at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. His next book will cover the mathematics of modern artificial intelligence.