The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | Roger Penrose

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | Roger Penrose | Perfect for where I'm at right now, but...

books:

The Road to Realit...

	The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe Roger Penrose Vintage, 2007 - 1136 pages average customer review:based on 159 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Roger Penrose, one of the most accomplished scientists of our time, presents the only comprehensive and comprehensible account of the physics of the universe. From the very first attempts by the Greeks to grapple with the complexities of our known world to the latest application of infinity in physics, The Road to Reality carefully explores the movement of the smallest atomic particles and reaches into the vastness of intergalactic space. Here, Penrose examines the mathematical foundations of the physical universe, exposing the underlying beauty of physics and giving us one the most important works in modern science writing.

for more information click here

Not the usual watered down pop physics book.

This book took some time to read! In my opinion, if you want to understand current work in physics, you need to have the basics under your belt. Roger Penrose starts with the basics and works all the way through at a very challenging pace. He introduces the necessary math in a very straight forward, easy to understand way in the first few chapters and they were fascinating! After that, it gets even better building on the very basics where he began. This is not one of those books that you can read in a weekend or on a long plane trip, so plan to take some time and enjoy this one. It will be well worth the effort.

for more information click here

Perfect for where I'm at right now, but...

This book is perfect for where I'm at right now, which is at an advanced undergraduate level of studying physics. It covers pretty close to all of the ideas in physics that are out there right now, and most of the major areas of mathematics that are involved in explaining these physical theories. As such, it makes a great review of what I've encountered so far, and gives the clearest exposition I've yet encountered for many of the advanced ideas that I've only thus far encountered tangentially. Even for "basic" ideas, Penrose often chooses a way of explaining an idea that is significantly different from how most texts will explain them. His explanantions of complex numbers and the uses of the complex plane, differential forms, and 4-velocity and 4-momentum pop out in my memory as particularly good, and are concepts that I don't feel I entirely "got" until here. Also, he builds the concepts upon each other slowly and systematically, giving the entire book a "story arc" that's rare among physics and mathematics texts. Most of the second half of the book is devoted to what could be considered "cutting edge" physics, and he does an excellent job of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the various approachs.

That being said, if this is your first exposure to these topics, you will be lost. The math is generally more clearly built up from what would be a non-mathematically minded person's starting point, but even that has points at which an extremely subtle mind is needed to fill in the intervening steps. The physics is even more difficult if you've had no exposure, but I personally found this to be one of the books virtues. For instance, you will probably come away with no understanding of electromagnetism and how electricity and magnetism came to be seen as unified if this is your first exposure, but for those who already have encountered it at an undergraduate level, you will come to a much deeper appreciation of its symmetries.

All in all an excellent book, but the publishers should reconsider the way they are marketing it as a book for the layman.

for more information click here

The Road To Reality

I highly recommend the reading of this impressive book. It is able to embrace almost all of the mathematical background a serious theoretical physicist should have...and it does so in a both deeply and understandable fashion. It is suitable for anyone interested in knowing why something arising from tbe human mind is capable to describe the Universe. This book may be suplemmented by Geometry, Topology and Physics, Second Edition (Graduate Student Series in Physics), by Mikio Nakahara, a reading recommended for those who may want to go even deeper into the mathematics-physics relationship.

for more information click here

Superbly flawed!

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!

for more information click here