Anil Ananthaswamy is driven by a curiosity to understand the natural world and our place in it.

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.

Anil Ananthaswamy’s TED Talks

More news and ideas from Anil Ananthaswamy