Patchen Barss's new biography of Roger Penrose offers more than just a chronicle of the renowned physicist's scientific achievements. It delves into the personal struggles and complexities of the man behind the equations, revealing a lifelong search for connection amidst intellectual brilliance.
At one point in Patchen Barss’s new biography of Roger Penrose , we find the author seated at a table in the Oxford flat of his subject, about to interview him for the first time. It is 2018. The celebrated mathematical physicist, then 87 and still two years away from winning the Nobel Prize, is in the kitchen preparing tea and biscuits. It’s a stereotypical English moment, yet the apparent ordinariness is deceptive, like the opening to a Lewis Carroll story.
In short order, their conversation draws Barss into Penrose’s Alice-in-Wonderland world of puzzles and illusions – and then further along to black holes, cosmology and the more challenging calculus of human relationships.“It was something I thought a lot about when I was writing,” Barss said in an interview. “I put it in and took it out. I had it at different places.” In the end, the scene lands exactly when it happens in the chronology of Roger Penrose’s life as one of the era’s most unique and agile thinkers. By then, there is a poignancy to it. Barss’s subject is well known for his work in theoretical physics as well as contributions to popular science, including Penrose tiles – geometric shapes that have the surprising property of covering a plane without producing a repeating pattern. What the book reveals is the human figure hidden inside the equations. In a way that is reminiscent of Penrose’s eponymous tiles, Barss builds his portrait through the meticulous placement of individual moments. They fit together seamlessly, yet the pattern they create is perpetually unresolved. So it also is with Penrose the man. Behind the towering intellectual lies a lifelong struggle to connect with those closest to him – a struggle initiated in childhood by parents that were emotionally inaccessible and then later exacerbated by Penrose’s introversion, ambition and retreats into work and the distractions of academic fam
Roger Penrose Biography Theoretical Physics Human Relationships Intellectual Brilliance
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