The Impossible Man
Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Guardian Best Science Book of the Year
The first biography - 'a stunning achievement' (Kai Bird, American Prometheus) - of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a "world behind the world" of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world's most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists.
Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him.
Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Barss (The Erotic Engine) presents a penetrating, warts and all biography of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose. A socially awkward kid from an unaffectionate family, Penrose had a meager social life that he compensated for by focusing his "psychic energies" on developing his intellect. Covering the milestones of Penrose's career, Barss recounts how, in his 30s, he upended theoretical physics in 1965 with his singularity theorem, which proved general relativity is incomplete because it can't account for the infinite density found inside black holes, and invented twistor theory, a conceptualization of space-time that he believes might reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. Barss's sensitive handling of Penrose's tumultuous personal life puts this a notch above other "great minds" biographies. For example, Barss writes that Penrose, like his father before him, "placed his work ahead of all other concerns," expressing indifference toward his romantic partners and children, and believing his single-minded focus on physics was an "inevitable and necessary" condition of his genius. Drawing on extensive interviews with Penrose, Barss balances reverence for his subject's "rare capacity to... think in four dimensions" against an unsparing recognition that he "would have been no less a physicist if he had... made more room for the people who loved, understood, and supported him." The result is a haunting portrait of a brilliant scientist unwilling to confront his personal shortcomings.
