“It’s all complicated, and it’s all connected,” Roger Penrose, Oxford theoretical physicist, told his biographer Patchen Barss in the first interview, in 2018, that would lead to Barss’ fascinating upcoming book, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius (Basic Books, Nov. 12). Penrose was conversing on cosmology, AI, music, chess, his mother’s death, and more, while fiddling with a tetrahedral puzzle he’d designed. He mentioned he was recently separated from his second wife; living alone for the first time in decades, he said it gave him more time for research. Estrangement from family is a sad theme of the book. Penrose won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020, for his 1960s “discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

Penrose’s wide-ranging work has fascinated me. In 1990, when I left my job at a bank technology magazine, I may have missed a deadline for COBRA because I was engrossed in Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. I became aware of Penrose in the early-1980s from mentions by Martin Gardner, who had publicized non-repeating Penrose tiling; in a review of “Seven Books on Black Holes” (none by Penrose), Gardner described “a bizarre mathematical entity” Penrose had invented, twistors, as “sort of halfway between particles and pure geometry.”

I wrote the above as part of a broader discussion at https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/weaving-science-politics-and-aliens. Regarding the book, specifically, readers should be aware it has a downbeat aspect, with its focus on Penrose's personal issues. With that in mind, I highly recommend it.

Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking changed science by writing accessible books for the general public. That’s assuming that "The Emperor’s New Mind" and "Brief History of Time" are accessible. I have copies of both but finished neither, though I do think that Mr Penrose’s book is the better read. The way someone like Mr Penrose becomes the genius scientist interested me and this biography does answer the question. It also shows a very flawed man who really doesn’t know how to treat people. His behaviour towards his wife and children is unpleasant to say the least.

He needed women to be his muse and it seemed to me that he needed their support to bolster his ego as much as help with his work. This is honest, and at times too honest, but it certainly gives an insight into a confident man who is prepared to stand by his ideas when others shout him down. His ideas changed physics even as his personality irritated people. Science needs people like Roger Penrose even if we ‘ordinary people’ have little chance of understanding his wide ranging arguments.

As a biography this is a success because we are left with a clear vision of the man and why his love for his subject grew from a sundial and an interaction with his father.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley.

I enjoyed this book about Rodger Penrose. I didn't know a great deal about him but was aware of some of his work. I have never made it past the first few pages of any of Penrose's own books which are notoriously hard to read, so was curious to find out more about him.

This biography leans towards Penrose the man, rather than his work. The author had extensive help from his subject and had access to a lot of materials, including letters and papers.

Penrose's childhood sounds amazing. It seems his genius was more visual rather than mathematical. He was lucky to have a Leopold Mozart-type father who was the perfect mentor to Penrose's budding genius. There seems to be no doubt that the relationship between the two led to so much that Penrose worked on and solving puzzles and games with his family naturally led to his early work on relativity.

The other big theme of the book is Penrose's need for a female "muse" and the resulting very one-sided relationships he had with women. He was unable to cope with his first wife Joan's depression, and much of the book explores his relationship with Judith, including extensive quotes from letters. Penrose used her as an unwilling muse and eventually drove her away. Other women were to fill this need in him in his subsequent relationships.

Penrose is an enormous subject, and the book concentrates more on these two areas: where his ideas came from, and the need for a muse. The Judith letters encapsulate both themes and that is why they are such a central part of the book. It would be good to know more, and doubtless more books about Penrose will follow, perhaps ones that look at his work in more detail.

I was surprised how his life took a turn after he began to concentrate on his books, which he could only produce with the help of some young unattached woman as his muse. It seemed as though he had some reaction to childhood trauma that translated in the way he felt attachment, and when he was challenged about this he experienced distress. I used to be a physicist and do not know anyone who takes cyclic conformal cosmology seriously, or his musings on human consciousness. I will be interested to see how this profile is received after publication.

I like the dynamic story that has been made for Penrose. This first biography of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose, you should read at your home. This story will challenge your mind.