» The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Superbly flawed!
Comment: A book with this breath and sublty comes along a couple of times in a generation. There have been Feynman's Lectures on Physics, Misner Thorne Wheeler Gravitation and others. Penrose is a world class mathematician and physicist (but you already know that). I cannot begin to adequately review this book even handedly because his audience is really other stellar mathematical physicists which I certainly am not.

I had the requisite math background so I understood most of it from cover to cover. But I am under no illusion that I have mastered the material. I can say the content is superficial and tricks the lay reader into thinking he has mastered something when he has not.

We are talking about maths that are even beyond the Ph.D. level of mathematical physics here folks! How can even Penrose condense tens of thousands of pages of textbooks that one routinely must grasp to get where he is with so much facility? The publisher must have thought (and Penrose rationalized) that they could sell more books if they touted that even a mathematically challenged reader could get something from it. This is not the case.

True, I was thrilled at Penrose's intuitive grasp of difficult abstractions that had me puzzled from studying more pedestrian texts on these subjects. Simply breathtaking. I was a page turner from the get-go. However I was under no illusions that I was learning something other than vaporware.

The most interesting idea that caught my eye was his critique of symmetry. Animals have evolved to be pattern recognition machines. Survival goes to the brain that can see the "tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. Who has framed thy fearful symmetry?"

Physicists and certainly mathematicians have been guided by a mystical belief that Nature must follow some beautiful elegant mathematical plan. What is the platonic world of ideas but the symmetry of our own evolved brain functions? -- Good for this time and place but not generalizable. It has worked so far but what if looking for symmetry is wrong. What if framing our equations in terms of groups is wrong. What if Nature is chaotic, asymmetric, fractal?

Penrose entertains that the last 30 years has produced nothing which makes sense or is even observable. Yet physicists blindly 'theory-on' capivated by their presumptions. The point is they have lost sight of the physics, the data, the observations.

As Firesign Theatre once said "The People! Give them a light and they will follow it anywhere!" Well, we know from history where this goes. Penrose suffers from his own criticisms and wants to create something like Einstein's elegant relativity applied to quantum gravity. Who can blame him? What is learning but man's vain search for God?

But what if QFT's incredible accuracy is only an accident like the resonance particles. Feynman and others fudged enough to get the answers they were looking for even though QFT is not in principle normalizable. It is not even beautiful!

What if Einstein and unitary quantum mechanics was the last hurrah of this sort of elegance in our species? Strings are beautiful but we will never know if the theory is observable. I'm afraid the measurement paradox is confusing what side of the experiment the measurement is taken.

It is consciousness and evolved brain structure that is the problem. Penrose in other books has the (admittedly crack pot notion) that quantum gravity collapses the wavefunction and thereby creates consciousness. But maybe he was looking in the right direction?

It is time to examine ourselves and our inherited prejudices as Nature is not only stranger (non-symmetric, anti commutative) than we suppose; it is stranger than we can suppose (Arthur Eddington). The future of physics and maths lies in understanding the limits of our own brains. Maybe the largest symmetry group that exists (the "Monster" of 196K dimensions) is the symmetry group of the thinkers which discovered it. And there are no groups bigger than this!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Unique!
Comment: This is definitely the most comprehensive book ever published on theoretical physics, written by one of the most influential theoretical physicists alive! But the reader should be forewarned : it is not easy reading, even if one skips the maths, as Penrose suggests in the Introduction...
Now, if one wants to understand everything, then it becomes really challenging, and I don't think many readers would be up to it. By understanding everything, I mean understanding enough to be able to do the exercises, and , believe me, this is no easy task!Especially that the author forgets most of the time that this is supposed to be a book for the "general public",so he writes as if he were giving a lecture to his graduate students.That is, he assumes that the reader knows already a lot about the subject at hand. Take, for instance, his explanation about the "clock paradox" of Special Relativity : not only is this explanation very special to Penrose, but he does not even explain what the "paradox" is all about! And so the reader who encounters it for the first time would tend to think that the paradox is only the fact that the voyager ages slower than the observer who stays behind, which is not altogether true...
The other aspect of the book that struck me is that Penrose distances himself from mainstream physics on two very important paradigms: spontaneous symmetry breaking in the early Universe, and inflationary cosmology. For him, there is no sufficient observational evidence for these two "speculative theories", as he calls them. Many cosmologists and physicists would surely disagree with him, but he has the honesty to express his beliefs, even when they are "out of phase" with those of other "pundits".And he has some very solid arguments, stemming from a deep insight into the Second Principle of Thermodynamics. It would be very interesting to see what the "inflationists" have to say about Penrose's arguments!
But be that as it may, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to all those readers who, like myself, are passionately looking for an explanation to the laws that govern "Reality", i.e the Universe we live in.

Finally, I would like to add here that "Publishers Weekly" makes a comparison between this book and Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". But this comparison is untenable: Hawking's small book is but child's play compared to this treatise!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: the real deal
Comment: excellent general primer for Quantum Mechanics and modern physics. Penrose is writing at a level for the reader who is willing to do some work to understand a very complicated subject. A much more educational experience than the usual books on quantum mechanics for the general reader

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Pi, À la mode.
Comment: I love this densely packed, entirely informative book. It gives a new level of understanding for those who enjoy reading about mathematics but who (like myself) have received no formal training in the field. There is a handy "notations" section, which was great, but I could have used a glossary as well. Otherwise, a great book and one I'm very glad I bought.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Scholastic
Comment: I love Mathematics and Physics The writter obviously loves them too judging by his 'Teacher' approach in presenting both subjects. The carefully crafted presentation in this book is a welcome approach for subjects such as these. I'm not finished reading the book but I already love it. Thanks for taking the effort.

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