For decades, the idea has been dismissed as too strange to take seriously. But experiments involving microtubules, anaesthetics and brain organoids are beginning to test whether quantum effects could play a role in consciousness.

We explore Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff鈥檚 controversial Orch OR theory, the evidence for and against it and whether quantum computers could one day help reveal what consciousness really is. We also venture into whether observation and consciousness could play a fundamental role in shaping reality itself.

In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace. The trees bloomed in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdrew from Los Angeles, and the convergence of flowers with the absence of foreign soldiers brought a delirious kind of hope. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knew the city was one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril made the season more vivid, not less.

It was Ari鈥檚 first spring outside of prison in nearly two decades, and she spent hours at a time walking the streets. Prison is a wasteland of sensory deprivation, and now the city was overwhelming. She kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening. No one around her seemed to notice the jacarandas, because in Los Angeles there are flowers every month of the year, but she walked streets where the trees were lit up by purple blue blossoms and thought, My god. This place. She was forty-eight years old but felt younger, because so much of the world was new.

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The United States had come undone following a coup d鈥櫭﹖at. Several states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbours, and war had broken out within the month. Now the fighting had subsided, for the most part, and Ari had been released into an uneasy aftermath.

鈥淲hen I think of what the city was a year ago,鈥� Gloria said. Gloria was Ari鈥檚 roommate in a very small apartment in Echo Park. She was about a decade younger than Ari, a refugee who鈥檇 fled fighting between rival militias in Tennessee. Gloria slept in the bedroom. Ari slept in the living room, with an old sheet stapled to the door frame as a makeshift door, and they met one another in the tiny kitchen. Gloria seemed to spend most of her time reading the news online, her eyes wide and blank in the blue light of her laptop. What the city had been like a year ago was Gloria鈥檚 favourite topic of conversation.

鈥淚 know,鈥� Ari said gently, although she didn鈥檛. Their experiences were not the same. A year ago, Ari had been imprisoned in what was now a different country and Gloria had been holed up in this apartment with a different roommate.

But tonight the curfew had lifted, and when Ari had gone for a walk earlier, her impression from passing conversations was that everyone in Los Angeles was going out tonight. Gloria was going to her friend Kareem鈥檚 party, one neighbourhood over, and had invited Ari to come. But now, with dusk approaching, she鈥檇 settled into her familiar position with her laptop at the kitchen table, and showed no signs of getting ready.

鈥淲hat time shall we leave for that party?鈥� Ari asked.

漏 Emily St. John Mandel

This is聽an extract from by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador),听the October read for the New 精东传媒 Book Club. Sign up for the club聽here, and join the discussion on Discord聽.

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by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

I started my colleague Karmela Padavic-Callaghan鈥檚 first book, , with trepidation. How could they deliver on its subtitle, 鈥渁 life according to quantum physics鈥�? I finished it with both a better understanding of all things quantum and a deeper desire to understand myself after reading Karmela鈥檚 own thoughtful journey as a queer, millennial immigrant.

This is a unique blend of memoir and science writing, in which Karmela interweaves growing up in Croatia, moving to New York, doing a physics PhD, teaching in high school and working as a New 精东传媒 reporter with big physics concepts.

So, how do you make links between, say, indefinite causality and a life-threatening tooth infection, or wave-particle duality and the realisation that you are queer? Somehow, Karmela does, and it all works to create a book that is clear and friendly on a scientific level, and candid and insightful on a personal one.

Quantum mechanics and general relativity don’t fit together, and a big part of the issue comes down to gravity. For decades, the accepted route to an ultimate theory of everything has involved taking our best theory of gravity and squeezing it into the frame of quantum mechanics. Yet, almost a century later, scientists still haven鈥檛 managed to make gravity fit. Ivette Fuentes is a professor of quantum mechanics who conducts experiments at the scales where quantum theory and general relativity interplay. Fuentes sat down with New 精东传媒 features editor Thomas Lewton to discuss the issues and fascinating theories that pop out when we try to fit classical and quantum mechanics together.

Read more: The experiments that could finally explain gravity