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The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe Hardcover – 29 July 2004
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| Hardcover, 29 July 2004 | £14.69 | — | £14.69 |
- Print length1000 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherJonathan Cape Ltd
- Publication date29 July 2004
- Dimensions16.6 x 6.5 x 24.4 cm
- ISBN-100224044478
- ISBN-13978-0224044479
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- Publisher : Jonathan Cape Ltd; First Edition (29 July 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 1000 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0224044478
- ISBN-13 : 978-0224044479
- Dimensions : 16.6 x 6.5 x 24.4 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 837,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 528 in Popular Astronomy
- 1,118 in Cosmology (Books)
- 27,360 in Nature
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This book is, in my estimation, is built for Maths, Physics and Cosmology as presently understood. It's helpful if you've encountered these topics previously as these often meshed together.
* Target Audience, A-level, H.N.D, Degree, Masters?
It's helpful if you have at least an A-level in these topics; Maths or Physics or Astronomy, prior to starting this book. All the better if have any degree background.
* Contents
1. the roots of science 2. An ancient theorem and a modern question, 3. Kinds of numbers in the physical world, 4 Magical complex numbers, 5. The geometry of logarithms, powers and roots, 6. Real-number calculus, 7. Complex number calculus, 8. Riemann surfaces and complex mappings, 9, Fourier decomposition and hyperfunctions, 10. Surfaces, 11. Hypercomplex numbers, 12. Manifolds of n dimensions, 13 Symmetry groups, 14. Calculus on manifolds, 15. Fibre bundle and gauge connections, 16 The ladder of infinity, 17 Spacetime, 18. Minkowskian geometry, 19 The classical fields of Maxwell and Einstien, 20. Lagrangians and hamiltonians, 21. The quantum particle, 22, Quantum algebra, geometry and spin, 23 The entangled quantum world, 24. Dirac's electron and antiparticles, 25 The standard model of particle physics, 26. Quantum field theory, 27 The big bang and its thermodynamic legacy, 28 Speculative theories of the early universe, 29. The measurement paradox, 30. Gravity's role in quantum state reduction, 31. Supersymmetry, supra-dimensionality and strings, 32 Einsteins narrower path and lop variables, 33. More radical perspectives; twistor theory, 34. Where lies the road to reality?
* What's the book like?
The book starts very simply and progressively builds upon Math, Physics and Cosmology. The further you read, the topics become more expanded and detailed. The book often has several lines, single sentences to carry the weight of the argument.
It's definitely better if you've read these topics before in other books. Its strength is carrying multi-level, multi-topic arguments along. My limit on previous reading is reading the standard model of particle physics. It's required on its own. I have this book on my shelf.
After later Cosmology parts, I became a bit overwhelmed with my inability to follow it with what it's trying to explain.
* Summary
This book tries its best to explain these topics. It requires other books beforehand. If you are into Cosmology, it's right up your alley.
I have a degree in Physics from rather a long time ago. I read and partly understood The Road to Reality, but not to the extent that I did all the exercises. Realistically you need a pretty good grasp of maths to follow this book. It does start off with the easy stuff, but if you do not already know some complex analysis and calculus, you'd have to be a genius to keep up.
What about the content? Good coverage of Special and General Relativity. I am not convinced by the non-standard tensor notation in the context of this book, though I think it would help if you actually needed to work with tensors, and particularly twistors. Quantum Field Theory is really only just touched on, but in a very clear way. Nice explanations of manifolds.
As many other reviewers have mentioned, String Theory and Inflation are introduced only to dismiss them. They are both very fashionable and it is probably not a good career move for a young physicist to agree with Penrose here. Fashion aside, I think he has a point.
Penrose's own baby, Twistor theory, is introduced in the penultimate chapter. Frankly I can see why people prefer strings -- this is complicated stuff; Penrose himself admits that it is not a theory that works yet, though I suspect there are some good ideas here, and it is a shame that fashion works against him.
I really liked the chapter on Shroedinger's cat, EPR and the Bell inequality. Penrose explains the main strands of philosophical ideas around the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There is a lot of woolly thinking on this subject, and Penrose deftly demolishes ideas such as many worlds and consciousness as a cause of reduction. Penrose's own position is that more physics is needed to explain quantum reduction. I would like to agree, but I think he needs to spell out his case against decoherence more clearly.
Why five stars? The amount of quality content is astonishing. Ideas fly off the page. There are few books that represent such a condensation of thought.
Only 4 stars because I think this book does require degree level mathematics or physics to be able to grasp many of the ideas.





