The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | 
 enlarge | Author: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  161 reviews
Sales Rank: 9162
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1136
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 2.2
ISBN: 0679776311
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.1
EAN: 9780679776314
ASIN: 0679776311
Publication Date: January 9, 2007
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Amazon.com Review
If Albert Einstein were alive, he would have a copy of The Road to Reality on his bookshelf. So would Isaac Newton. This may be the most complete mathematical explanation of the universe yet published, and Roger Penrose richly deserves the accolades he will receive for it. That said, let us be perfectly clear: this is not an easy book to read. The number of people in the world who can understand everything in it could probably take a taxi together to Penrose's next lecture. Still, math-friendly readers looking for a substantial and possibly even thrillingly difficult intellectual experience should pick up a copy (carefully--it's over a thousand pages long and weighs nearly 4 pounds) and start at the beginning, where Penrose sets out his purpose: to describe "the search for the underlying principles that govern the behavior of our universe." Beginning with the deceptively simple geometry of Pythagoras and the Greeks, Penrose guides readers through the fundamentals--the incontrovertible bricks that hold up the fanciful mathematical structures of later chapters. From such theoretical delights as complex-number calculus, Riemann surfaces, and Clifford bundles, the tour takes us quickly on to the nature of spacetime. The bulk of the book is then devoted to quantum physics, cosmological theories (including Penrose's favored ideas about string theory and universal inflation), and what we know about how the universe is held together. For physicists, mathematicians, and advanced students, The Road to Reality is an essential field guide to the universe. For enthusiastic amateurs, the book is a project to tackle a bit at a time, one with unimaginable intellectual rewards. --Therese Littleton
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 156 more reviews...
 Review only November 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Alas I must give thumbs down to this book. If you know the material then it can be a useful roadmap with some interesting highlights, but when he gets into an area you don't already know the book has little value. He doesn't explain the math, so it come across as a list of facts. Does a list of facts about tensors really sound useful? Compare this to the brilliant job Kolmogorov and others did in "Mathematics".
Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning Buy that instead.
 a natural wonder October 31, 2008
Wow. For the layperson, this is like an extended hiking tour of an astonishing natural wonder like the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest. But in this case, we see the natural wonder that is the clarifying insight of a master physicist. Here's one example: For the physicist, numbers are the basis of powerful calculations. But Penrose, the master physicist, sees more than that. He sees "terminating" as well as "infinite" architectural processes from which they are constructed. And in this way he describes, as the basis of reality, the finite meeting the infinite. (Which seems to me like poetic truth.)
Not the usual watered down pop physics book. September 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
The Road To Reality August 31, 2008
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.
Attempts the impossible August 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It is not possible to express the ideas of modern physics without using mathematics very different from what one studies in high school. But a popular physics book can hardly assume more than a high school level of math. Therefore popular physics books are impossible.
Penrose's 'The Road to Reality' is a demonstration of this proposition. Penrose must be congratulated for facing the problem head on, not shying away from the formulae and trying to teach his readers all the mathematics needed. Penrose is more capable than most for such an undertaking, and often he comes up with clever, intuitive ways of explaining difficult concepts. But ultimately the beautifully-crafted intuition collapses due to the lack of a supporting structure of necessary technical details and hard proofs and the reader is left holding fuzzy ideas which he cannot independently apply.
The book would be a great way for a graduate student in physics or mathematics to see the big picture. Others would do well to stick either with less ambitious popularizations or to go straight to the textbooks. For the former, my recommendation would be Penrose's own The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Popular Science) while for the latter there is no better place to begin than Singer and Thorpe's Lecture Notes on Elementary Topology and Geometry (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) and Needham's Visual Complex Analysis.
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