Carnal Reason

Roger Penrose’s latest book, The Road to Reality, is so generous in scope that it is difficult to absorb the breadth of its offerings. The text will seem gloriously variegated to some readers but frustratingly inaccessible to others. It’s a physically huge book, but every ounce of the content was designed with great care. There is no single road here, though; rather, Penrose has provided a bundle of interlaced narratives that must be teased out by the reader.

The first half of the book is devoted to mathematics and the second to physics. The math portion is pure delight. Penrose starts with the simplest ideas, such as counting, and builds gradually, with great care, until he has taught us most of the kinds of math that physicists wield these days (covering, for example, Riemann surfaces and complex mapping, hypercomplex numbers, manifolds of n dimensions, symplectic groups and tensors). It is simply astounding that he has accomplished this feat. He does invoke equations, but they are perfectly chosen for explanatory power and simplicity.

Reading this math section is eerily liberating. It is shocking that so much can be explained so well. The obvious comparisons are to The Feynman Lectures on Physics or George Gamow’s One, Two, Three . . . Infinity, but the achievement here is greater, because the book starts at such an elementary level and soars to such heights, without any glitches along the way. It’s a magical escape from the bounds of gravity.

Jaron Lanier, American Scientist

I wish I had the time to read it.

Posted on September 27th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: books, science