Tresspassing on Einstein's Lawn by Amanda Gefter

  This book is a well-written, fascinating treatment of the lastest results in physics and cosmology in the context of the author's quest to understanding nothingness. Below is an inperfect summary for me to recall what I read.
Asking a yes or no question gets a bit of information. John Wheeler suspected that the universe is built up bit by bit by these measurements. Ours is a participatory universe. Wheeler like to say that the universe is a self-excited circuit, and that the boundary of the boundary is zero.
Wheeler "believed that the universe was right for observers because, somehow, observers create the universe." In special relativity the Lorenz transformation moves one path to another so that you are both loooking at the same world whatever your reference system (in unifom motion). With accelerated motion the parth through spacetime is curved. To match it up with a straight line path you need to curve space. "The wrinkles are gravity." "An inertial frame with a gravitational field is indistinguishable from an accelerated frame without a gravitational field."
Guth said, "...Today we think that the universe has zero values for all conserved quantities." Gravity has a negative contribution to the total energy. It always attracts and it takes energy to separate. It takes energy to bring electric charges together. Guth also said "Everything we see is in some sense nothing." Hawking said that we need to work from the top down, from the present to the past. We create the history of the universe.
"Something is real only if it's invariant." The same in every reference frame.  "..all the forces arise in essentially the same way--specifically, to account for the fact that things appear differently in different reference frames." An electron is described by a wave function which has a phase. If you step to the left you change the phase. The phases don't line up because you can't change it everywhere so you have to bend things which is electromagnetism which is a gauge force.  To "keep all reference frames on equal footing, you need a gauge force.
Chapter 7, Carving the World into Pieces, has much in it, and is too hard to adequately summarize. Gefter talks about the arrow of time and entropy which is a measure of hidden information. Temperature and pressure are shorthand for the detailed information about a gas. An individual molecule doesn't have a temperature. Gravitational entropy points in the opposite direction. It clumps stuff. Gravity is interesting at a black hole. The area of an event horizon can never decrease which resembles the second law of thermodynamics. Bekenstein claimed an event horizon's area is entropy. Hawking showed that black holes do radiate. The event horizon restructures the vacuum. It restricts the wavelengths of zero-point energy that can fit, spawning particles that wouldn't otherwise be there. The particles of Hawking radiation are observer-dependent. An accelerated observer sees a Rindler horizon which is like the event horizon of a black hole. Gravity and acceleration are equivalent. If space expands you get a deSitter event horizon, so we are surrounded by an event horizon. We each have our own universe.
The idea that the total amount of information in any region of three-dimensional space scales with the area of the two-dimensional boundary is called the holographic principle. Two descriptions--inside and outside the horizon--are complementary. The location of a bit becomes observer-dependent when gravity becomes important. Spacetime is no longer invariant.
Geometry, spacetime, doesn't fluctuate.
There isn't a single reality that all observers share. Wave-function collapse is observer-dependent. Interference in the two-slit experiment refers to a comparison between what is observed by one observer and what would be observed by another observer, a comparison between two different frames. If reality weren't observer dependent we wouldn't see interference. Interference cancels out the disagreements between our perspectives.
Light uses up its entire spacetime quotient on space, leaving none for time. It sees all of space in no time. Light is everywhere in a single instant. A photon sees a singularity. Horizons don't have horizons. The boundary of the boundary is zero. Eleven points in Chapter 15 summarize her results. The universe is nothing. If it were something it wouldn't be described by quantum mechanics.You need a broken symmetry to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.

Life on the Edge The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili

            The European robin uses its ability to detect the earth's magnetic field to migrate, yet the magnetic force is very weak but the robins use quantum entanglement to make it work.

            The steam engine works by heating water so that the random motion of the steam pushes a piston. A balloon inflating is producing order from the disorder of the random motions of the air inside. But Schrodinger thought order from disorder would not apply to life because of the small scale and fewer molecules involved.

            "This process by which random molecular motion disrupts carefully aligned quantum mechanical systems is known as decoherence." But life can produce order from order. Quantum tunneling allows particles to cross a barrier that should be impossible. A body made up of many particles must remain coherent to tunnel. Enzymes allow quantum tunneling. Electrons travel along respiratory chains via quantum tunneling. Protons can also quantum tunnel.  At the molecular level biological processes can be very fast and confined to short distances so tunneling can have an effect and decoherence avoided. In photosynthesis a protein (FMO) keeps decoherence at bay trying all path like a quantum computer. Photosynthesis and respiration are not that different underneath. Plants obtain carbon from air but we get it from organic sources. Maybe this quantum coherence can be brought to solar cells.

            Biomolecules can detect vibrations of chemical bonds via quantum tenneling. Olfactory receptors may work this way.

            Further chapter treat quantum genes, mind, how life began, and quantum biology.

The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam

The Spotlight Effect -- An honor coffee pot in an office collected three times as much in weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7 of a study than in weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8. The odd numbered weeks features a picture of watching eyes while the even-numbered pictures were of flowers. Workers did not notice the photos.
When a waitress mimicked the customers ordered verbatim after a short delay, tips were 140% larger. Changing the words did not get the increase.
Couples can work together if they achieve in different areas but not if they compete.
Kids learn faces very early. Seventy percent of children studied assigned positive adjectives to white faces and negative to black. Bias weren't coming from parents or teachers. Kids pick it up from what they see.
Our hidden brain is quick to draw conclusions. At middle school age when kids are able to correct these early impressions they start to drop their friends of other races. This is the stage of defining ones group.
When workers change gender to male they are treated better, and when they change to female they are treated worse.