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84 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
The road right back to the book shop., 4 April 2006
By A Customer
This book certainly seems to polarise opinions. I have yet to read a neutral review of it. It is either praised to the skies or condemned as useless. It doesn't take a Penrose (or an Aristotle) to point out that these two views are logically incompatible!.
I have a good deal of sympathy with the reviewer who got as far as chapter 6 before giving up in disgust. I have got just a little bit further at the cost of considerable effort. However I do not think the book is useless and I'm sure some readers will genuinely enjoy it.
There are a few problems. Firstly the blurb is plain dishonest. Secondly Penrose's preface in which he states that it is possible to read the book and gain something from it whilst skipping most of the maths is hopelessly naive and optimistic.
Make no mistake about it, if you do not enjoy Maths for its own sake you are not going to get very far with this book.
Like several of your other reviewers I studied Maths at school and enjoyed it .
I then went on to study Medicine at university and have always nursed a vague sense of inferiority about my "school boy" Maths.
I believe anyone who tackles the book with this kind of background is going to struggle pretty badly and more specifically they are going to get stuck on chapter 7 ("Complex number calculus").
Personally I read the first 6 chapters with enjoyment and even managed to do some of the examples. It started me thinking again about the Maths I had learned long ago and I found that I enjoyed doing so. Further Maths books were purchased and most outside observers are of the opinion that I have wasted a good deal of time (I have however enjoyed myself in a strange sort of way.)
I now understand (to my own satisfaction at least) most of the first 6 chapters. It has to be said that I learned very little of this from actually reading Penrose's book on its own. I found further reading essential. Penrose presents only the barest bones of the subject and expects a great deal from the reader in terms of thinking for him or herself. There is absolutely no "spoon feeding". The prose is dense and takes some getting used to, however I think he does manage to communicate a sense of excitement in the subject.
The approach is unconventional but I have found that if something is already well understood ( by learning it at a more leisurely pace elsewhere) then Penrose's take on the subject can be quite illuminating. For example his approach to the exponential form of a complex number via an informal but convincing definition of a complex logarithm is far easier to grasp intuitively than the usual power series proof.
So far so good. No more school Maths after chapter 6!
Before reading this book I had never heard of complex calculus. Perhaps I flatter myself but I don't honestly believe anyone unfamiliar with this subject will gain anything more than a headache by reading chapter 7. I read and re read this chapter several times before giving up and skipping to chapter 10 ("Surfaces") which seemed to be related. I got on better with chapter 10 and realised I had completely missed the point of chapter 7. Why the hell didn't he put chapter 10 first? Having said this chapter 10 is still very difficult and I got so frustrated with it that I went out and bought an introductory text on vector calculus.
After reading this (and this stuff is pretty challenging in spaces that are flat. No one is going to glide through this) and then doing a bit more research on the web I think I have got as far as seeing what Penrose is trying to explain in chapters 10 and 12 ("n-dimensional manifolds") .This of course is not the same thing as actually understanding it.
If I ever do understand it (unlikely) then chapter 19 ("The classical fields of Maxwell and Einstein", 29 pages in all) should be a walk in the park ,I will have finished with classical physics for good and can start the difficult stuff!
Penrose clearly hopes that by explaining the essential concepts behind a subject and leaving out what (to him) are unnecessary computational details the reader will gain enough insight to grasp the essentials.
As I have said before the man is an optimist. Intelligent people can sometimes take intuitive short cuts with subjects they understand well. Beginners don't stand a chance.
If you enjoy Maths but don't have a degree in it ,are very well motivated to understand some of modern physics and have grown inpatient with the usual popularisations by all means buy this book.
I don't honestly think most people will finish it. If however your curiosity is aroused and in defiance of common sense you become infected with Penrose's incurable optimism you will buy a lot more books, blunt a few pencils and severely test the patience of your family and friends. You might even learn something.
Alternatively you could always stain it with coffee, make spurious notes in the margin and display it prominently on your shelf where everyone will see it. I suspect this last motivation will sell a lot of copies!
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89 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
Elegant or Wonderful?, 10 Aug 2004
This is probably the best book I've ever read. It's a cross between a popular science book and a physics textbook. No other popular science book contains this level of technical detail; therefore no other pop-sci book really explains what's going on. Of course all this knowledge comes at a cost. I found it really hard going at times, and this was meant to be some light summer reading after my exams. (I've just finished a master's degree in theoretical physics). Lots of common things like Fourier series and complex analysis (which I thought I understood) are explained in a brilliant way from a different perspective, which I had never thought of before. And why had no one ever shown me diagrammatic tensor notation? That would have been very useful. Any way it's all in here. The exercise are in the foot notes and are very useful to help you understand the ideas in greater depth, I think many of the problems are for people with some training in the subject though. However you don't need a degree to read this book just an interest in the subject and a lot of patience would probably go a long way. This is one of those books where the more you know the more you get out of it. It took Penrose 8 years to write apparently but I'm amazed one person could write it at all. I'm only half way through reading it, it touches on most areas of theoretical physics and I believe will become a classic. The only complaint I would have (and this may be because I'm reading an early release) is that there are a few typos, particularly in the figure caption equations. However that shouldn't detract from an amazing work that goes where no pop sci has gone before...
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
Not For The True Layman, But Fantastic Otherwise, 10 April 2006
By A Customer
I agree with other reviewers that this book is not appropriate for anyone without a degree in the physical sciences. However, people who have done a degree, even in physics at a prestigious university often come out not really knowing what's going on. Courses almost exclusively focus on examineable material and so the beauty of the whole thing is lost in routine calculations and derivations. If this sounds unhappily familiar, this book is probably for you.For me, it was probably the most engrossing book I have ever read. Penrose explains how all the various theories and theorems interact to form a beautiful and coherent whole, but does so by building on the maths rather than the broken analogies pop-science usually uses. It is probably worth bearing in mind that he does have a rather unusual interpretation of even the most basic physical theories. The interpretations come directly from the maths, so there is certainly no crackpottery going on, though it can be a bit of work to connect back to what you already know from university. But when you do, it is the most fantastic feeling in the world, and the reason this is the only book I have ever bothered to review on amazon.
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
Are you up for a challenge?, 18 Aug 2004
By A Customer
Bravo to Penrose and his publishers for daring to lay this before the general reader! This review is really for those like me who have had no formal mathematical training beyond the age of 15, yet wish to understand as best they can how the universe exists and unfolds. Penrose doesn't give up on us before he's started and just give us the gloss, he treats us as real willing students. I'm only up to chapter 11 so far, and many parts of it are certainly hard work - an evening may be spent on 3 or 4 pages. But he is a good teacher, and works hard at taking the reader deeper in successive steps. Those without a mathematical background will still need to consult other books, or skip bits, but it is a valiant effort. With a long way to go yet I feel sure the thought and concentration required will be amply rewarded. Why should these things be understood only by the cognoscenti? Penrose and his publisher's have been brave in producing this fine work. Be brave and read it!
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
amazing, 16 April 2006
If the maths hurt you...don't give up, do persevere as this book is amazing. Read it carefully and slowly even if it's just a page a day. If you find that you are really stuck and need an alternative method of concieving complex concepts then use wikipedia or mathworld.com as a reference back-up or second narrative. Although you can skip the math-heavy bits and just read the text and get a vaguely decent understanding of physical laws, but to do so would be to deny yourself the extraordinary beauty and elegance of mathematical reasoning as applied to universal phenomena.
This book is unique - Proffesor Penrose is among the best mathematical physicists of the modern era and yet he has sufficient empathy with the lay-man to take you by the hand and guide from the very basics of pythagoras up to the giddy-heights of quantum mechanics.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
A book with a message, 11 Jul 2007
Ohter reviews focus on whether the book is easy to understand or not, or wheter it is too big or not. And it would seem that
the only purpose of the book is to put all togheter the physical laws mankind knows.
But this is a book with a message. A message that takes very long to transmit and Penrose chose to start from the very begining.
A significant part of the physics as it is known today is exposed in a long (900 pages) preamble, but Penrose wants to tell
us that he believes that the road to the Theory of Everything that is standard in today's physics leads nowhere.
If you have read "The Emperor's new mind" you know that Penrose's ideas are not mainstream in today's physics. But if you are
interested in cutting edge physics you'll also know that there is a growing number of physicists that believe that the field is on crisis. Let me sumarize Penrose views:
- The standard interpretations of quantum mechanics are wrong. Even the decoherence approach.
- Infactionary cosmology cannot be right.
- Superstring theory is just a beautiful mathematical construction with no connection to the physical world. His point of view is similar to Smolin's ("The trouble with physics").
I'm not at all an expert on the field, although I studied quantum mechanics in the University, and I'd say that at least Penrose has a very strong point. He is not able to provide but hints of alternative theories but this does not lower the merit of the book.
He also explains standard areas of mathematics and physics such as complex number calculus, Maxwell fields or group theory in a non-conventional but brilliant way. For example, it includes a beautiful demonstration of Pythagoream theorem. The chapter about the standard model of particle physics is particularly helpful; nowhere else can be found a concise and understable explanation of it.
And yes, the book is difficult, but if you don't understand the mathematics, just keep reading.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Mixed Feelings, 16 Dec 2006
This is an extraordiarily long book written from an unusual perspective.
I think the author is absolutely correct in describing himself as "incurably optimistic" in assuming that lay readers will be able to follow the arguments in the book. It takes many years to learn the calculational techniques of complex analysis, differential geometry and topology, and to assume a reasonably gifted, but untrained reader can follow the details is asking a bit too much. That said, I think the book would be extremely useful for someone working in the field as an overview of diverse areas of Mathematical Physics. Unfortunately, this restricts the target audience significently.
The author tries hard to be honest and open about the times when he is presenting his own opinions which are not generally accepted by the scientific community, which is much appreciated. An alternative perspective to the followers of the String Theory bandwagon is always welcome !
If the potential reader is looking for a layman's level introduction to Theoretical Physics, I would recommend t'Hooft's "In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks", or for General Relativity, Hawkings "Brief History of Time".
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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
Very comprehensive, yet very complicated., 12 Dec 2004
Having finally finished this book, i am still undecided whether this is the best book on general physiscs i ever read or if it is just too plain complicated to be ever fully understood by non-(thoretical) physicists. The book starts with lots of mathematcis (ch. 1-16) to give the reader the background for the following chapters. The math is presented in an unusual way. Penrose tried to fit in all the math needed but he tried to avoid the proofs and technicalities of most of the statements. The reader, if not already familiar with advanced math, is overwhelmed by the mass of definitions and new concepts. Sadly, most of the rest of the book depends exactly on the math of the first few chapters, so if you got lost there you probably won't recover and stay confused for the rest of the book. However, the physics Penrose presents covers almost all the modern developments in almost all fields of physics and merely by reading (though not understanding) about all those topics i felt the fascination and beauty that lies behind them, and was encouraged to have a look at topics like general relativity in a more spelled out way in other books. I feel that the main reason Penrose wrote this book is to accomplish exactly that:
Encourage readers all over the world to get into these topics, read more about them, and maybe finally take a step further on the road to reality. (see Epilogue) If you are looking for an illustrative and popular read on modern physics, get Greene or Hawkins.
If you want a signpost to decide what to read next, Penrose will help you find the right way.
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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
Great spring board to the laws of universe, 13 Nov 2006
I am B.Tech (Electrical), M.E. (Telecommunication). So you will be aware of my mathematical background.
I started on 1/11/2006. Today it is 13/11/2006. After 13 days, I covered 495 pages out of 1049 pages. Twice.
The book is a must have. Why? Well I always wanted to learn all that is in the book. But, could not find any book which gives simple mathematical introduction to the complex world of Complex numbers, Manifolds, Hamiltonian, Lagrangian, Tensor calculus, Relativity, etc. This book is the right book. This book teaches required maths for the layman. You could call this book as "Maths for 'The Road to Reality' for DUMMIES". It gives you all the mathematics, motivation, explanation, that one needs to appreciate the laws of the universe. I read the book twice. One can read 1 chapter per day. Master it and move forward. No need to solve the problems to understand the contents. The diagramatic representation of Tensor calculus and more than 100 hand-drawn figures convey accurate mathematics in geometrical form.
Geometry is easy to understand than symbols. So penrose explains all complex maths geometrically. With this you appreciate what is happening and what the equations convey. Once you get the feeling of the equation then you are done. Every chapter, Penrose refreshes what was taught earlier and how previous chapter is related to the current chapter. He also mentions what will be the use of the current chapter in relevance to the next chapters.
I wish, Penrose had begun every chapter with a 1 page introduction as to what will be covered in the chapter. This will prepare the reader to set proper frame of mind.
I give 5 stars for: 1) Clear geometrical explanation to complex mathematics to understand the laws of Universe. 2) Beautifully leading throught the chapters. 3) Only one of its kind.
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70 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
Absolutely amazing and stunning, 22 Jul 2004
By A Customer
This book is so vast in its scope that it makes me feel I don't need any other book of this kind anymore.
This is the real bible for one trying to understand the Universe and the laws that govern it. First half of the book is just a mathematical background that is needed to understand the second part of the book - the physics of the Universe.
I cannot predict when (and whether) I will finish it, because it seems so complicated at the end, but I can be pretty much sure that any part of this superb book will enormously advance my general knowledge in mathematics, physics or life in general.
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