There’s a new book out this week, a biography of Roger Penrose by Patchen Barss, with the title The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the cost of genius. Penrose is one of the greatest figures in physics and mathematical physics of the second half of the twentieth century, arguably the dominant theorist in the field of general relativity. His work on twistors is the most important new idea about space-time geometry post-Einstein, and I believe it will be studied long after string theory has been finally consigned to the oblivion of failed ideas. His 2004 book The Road to Reality is an unparalleled comprehensive summary of the geometric point of view on fundamental physics, a huge work of genius written to try and convey the deepest ideas around to as many people as possible.
The new biography provides a lot of detail about Penrose’s life and work, well beyond what I’d learned over the years from reading his writings and those of others who worked with him. It does a good job of explaining to a wide audience some areas of his work, and how the background he grew up in helped make some of his great achievements possible. From an early age, Penrose was fascinated by geometry, and he became our greatest master at visualizing four dimensional space-time, generating deep insights into the subject. While one can motivate twistor theory in several very different ways, it came to him through such visualization.
Another thing I learned from the book was more of the story of the singularity theorems for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020. While Hawking often gets more attention for this, it seems that there’s a good case that the creative ideas there were more Penrose’s, with Hawking much better at getting attention for his work. That, despite having read a great deal about this story over the years, I’d never heard that Penrose saw things this way until reading this book is much to his credit.
In later parts of the book, the author handles well the issue of some of Penrose’s more problematic later projects. Experts on cosmology are highly skeptical of his conformal cyclic cosmology ideas, and pretty much everyone thinks his involvement with Stuart Hameroff around questions having to do with consciousness has been misguided.
Penrose played an important role in my life, by suggesting to his publisher that they publish Not Even Wrong (for the story of that, see here). While, I haven’t been in contact with him for many years, and only have met him in person briefly twice, he seemed to me unassuming and more likely to be friendly and helpful to others than your average academic.
Unfortunately, the book pairs a largely very good discussion of Penrose’s scientific career with a very extensive and rather unsympathetic discussion of his personal life. If you read reviews such as the one today in the Wall Street Journal, you’ll be told that Penrose’s personal story “fits the template” of the genius as “deeply weird”, with the book showing that “the cost of genius” is personal sacrifices by those around him.
The huge amount of material included in the book about Penrose’s parents, his two long marriages and his relationships with his four children seems to me to paint a picture completely typical of his generation. That an upper-class British man growing up in the 1930s and 1940s would have an emotionally withholding father is not very notable. That a male academic of this period would have a marriage that failed after 20 years is not unusual, nor is having a wife with very valid complaints about giving up her own career and interests to follow her husband around to different positions. None of this has anything to do with Penrose’s genius or great accomplishments, beyond the common phenomenon of successful people being too busy and preoccupied to provide enough attention and care to those around them.
The central part of the book is derived from a collection of 1971-76 letters between Penrose and Judith Daniels, a younger woman who had been a childhood friend of his sister. Penrose was unhappy in his marriage, very much in love with Daniels, and saw her as his muse, someone who could appreciate his work. Unfortunately for him, she had a boyfriend and no interest in a sexual relationship or marriage with him. The book goes on for pages and pages quoting these letters and explaining the details of exactly what happened. It’s no more interesting than one would expect. One could argue that Penrose did do something rather objectionable to her, trying to get her to read the manuscript of his two volume joint work with Wolfgang Rindler, Spinors and Space-time.
The four chapters devoted to this story unfortunately are also the ones covering the time of his great work on twistor theory, which gets somewhat buried amidst the not very dramatic unrequited love drama. This section of the book ends with a dubious attempt to connect the two together:
He couldn’t let go of twistor theory, and he couldn’t let go of Judith. In a single letter, he both lamented the impossibility of recreating the magic they once shared and attempted to do exactly that. He wouldn’t take no for an answer — from her or from the universe.
For the years 1971-76, this book provides all the detail you could ever want about why Roger Penrose wanted to sleep with Judith Daniels and why she wasn’t interested. For the details of the story of one of the great breakthroughs in understanding the geometry of the physical world, we’re going to have wait for another book.
Thanks for this thoughtful and illuminating review. I had read one other (non-scientist) review and was intrigued. Admittedly, now I am much less interested.
I heard Penrose speak a couple of times (like 30 or 35 years ago), though that was firmly in the Emperor’s New Mind era, which struck me as being based upon very poor argumentation. Even today with students I use it as an example of how someone can be clearly quite brilliant and make enormous contributions, but still be wrong about other things.
Peter, you are now making me feel guilty about having enjoyed James Gleick’s book about Feynman’s private life. Maybe if had known Feynman personally, as I do Penrose*, I would have just felt that his private life was none of his damned business and that he should just leave it alone!
* = not very well, but well enough to know that he’s a nice, polite man.
Hi Chris,
Thing is, I normally greatly enjoy scientific biographies which include details of the subject’s private life, the more outrageous the better. If a biographer wants to tell us that Feynman and Hawking were regulars at strip clubs, that’s fine with me. Actually I thought the recent Hawking biography that had a lot about his private life was quite good, see
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12235
What I don’t like about this particular treatment of Penrose’s private life is
1. It appears to me to be a moralistic hit job, making out Penrose to be an unusually flawed human being (rather than the usually flawed kind).
2. It’s boring (there’s a whole chapter about the big moment when he and Judith both went to Trieste, stayed in the same hotel. She told him she was not interested in a romantic involvement with him and they went sightseeing).
The thing that makes great geniuses interesting and their stories signifcantly different from lots of other people is almost never their personal romantic lives. Their upbringings on the other hand are frequently very interesting, and probably relevant.
Hi Peter, I know Penrose a bit better than you, but not by much. The main connection is that I am friends with one of his protégés and have spoken to him a few times at this person’s parties. Yes, Feynman and Hawking loved the idea that they were the Wild Ones and would have wanted you to know all about their visits to Titty Bars, etc., but Penrose is definitely not that kind of person, and will not relish anyone dredging through his past. Maybe the author thinks that him being a Nobel Laureate, and all, makes him fair game, but I don’t think so, and nor do I think it has much bearing on his work in mathematics.
As an Oxford man myself, I might add to your analysis the fact that Oxford has held Penrose in the highest regard as long as I can remember, and the fact that Twistor Theory has had limited (so far) impact on physics is not held against him. Bear in mind that Theology, Philosophy and Classics are the high status subjects around these parts.
Diogenes,
This is certainly true in Penrose’s case. He grew up in an unusual family, providing him an unusually rich intellectual background while growing up. This is described well in the book.
I think the parts of the book on Penrose’s relationship with Daniels and the dissolution of his relationship with his wife are actually very important. They show very clearly how entwined his professional and personal life were and how even someone like Penrose can have a great (for lack of a better word) insecurity over his work. In a better world this kind of material would be completely frivolous, but in reality, when people think about great scientists like Penrose, they come in with a whole set of deeply ingrained ideas about what such a person must be like.
For example, Penrose going on the Joe Rogan podcast was reported by Barss as a key episode in the ending of his relationship with his second wife. Taken in and of itself, that’s completely uninteresting, but I think it’s important to understand that when Penrose goes on the Joe Rogan podcast, he’s getting as much out of it as Rogan, and arguably more – a massive audience and an open platform for ideas which he thinks have been unfairly dismissed. This kind of dynamic is usually pretty much invisible to (if not outright rejected by) the general public, so I think it’s important to have such an open display of it. If even someone like Penrose can have such a gross craving for a certain kind of recognition, I think this can strongly inform how we see much lesser ‘pop’ scientists who are still often given every benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, of course I would love to see greater focus on technical biography and the research development of many parts of his work! Hopefully someone else will write a truly ‘scientific’ biography of Penrose.
AUT,
After reading the book, I just don’t see how the failure of Penrose’s first marriage was much different than the typical way half of such marriages fail. Like many people, he seems to have decided soon after the marriage that it was a mistake, but stayed in it hoping things would change. It’s the biographer who seems to be claiming that there was something distinctive about the nature of genius responsible for this, but I’m not seeing it.
Later in life Penrose became a public figure very much in demand, even if not quite on the Hawking scale. From then on, he had the usual temptations of celebrity to deal with, and one can question his choices (maybe a bad one was agreeing to open his life to this biographer…). I’m not sure what this set of problems has to do with being a genius.
I think that if there’s a thesis statement for that part of the book, it’s in this paragraph:
“Joan, Judith, Salley, and Vanessa, each in her own way, made Roger’s career possible. They managed his everyday life, freeing him to journey into black holes and tinker with conformal geometry. Beyond offering the praise and encouragement he considered essential to his creative process, they were variously sounding boards and editors, career counsellors, confidantes, and muses, willing or not. Some sacrificed their own careers and put his needs ahead of their own. They offered intellectual, logistical, and emotional support. Joan, whom Lionel treated as a blight on the Penrose mystique, served a crucial role in developing Roger’s belief in his own exceptional talents. He used their unhappy marriage as justification for fully embracing the work that established his career and won him the Nobel.”
Aside from whether or not this kind of content is valuable as biography (and I think it is), I think it’s very different from saying that there’s something about genius which is responsible for various life conditions. If anything it’s something more like the converse, that for some people the ability to creatively prosper is built on having a certain kind of environment and a certain kind of psychological and/or material (dis)comfort. It also reminds me of Shing-Tung Yau’s autobiography, where I found it very striking that his wife was for some years raising their young children alone on the opposite side of the country, during some of the most productive years of his career.
I think it’s very valuable to understand that such tremendously productive and creative workers – call it genius if you like – often don’t exist in a vacuum. It might already be plainly obvious to many of us, but to the broader public I think it’s definitely not.
AUT,
Yes, that’s a clear thesis statement. The problem is with the accusation that Penrose achieved what he did by treating the women in his life (and his children) unusually badly. Everyone is reliant upon those close to them for support. Most marriages of Penrose’s generation involved a wife willing to forgo having her own career, move because of her husband’s job, stay home to raise children and support her husband’s career.
It’s fine for a biographer to point out that Penrose, like most men of his generation, was able to succeed because of such an arrangement. What I don’t see is any evidence from the book that there was anything even slightly unusual about Penrose’s story in this regard.
Interesting, and there is now a NYT review of the book.
Penrose was doubtless one of the great original thinkers at his prime (which spanned decades), and I too found his semi-popular book The Road to Reality impressive. He has had many great hits, some of which Peter mentions above. However his later/recent efforts in cosmology were embarrassing. He nevertheless continued to push his theory (conformal cyclic cosmology), and even “find” evidence of it in the cosmic microwave background (with a collaborator who evidently agreed to do so) despite being told by cosmologists that his theory, and certainly the “finding” in the data, is basically nonsense. I guess in that regard he’s no different from other greats who could not be stopped from doing and claiming such things in later years (e.g. Michael Atiyah claiming he solved the Riemann Hypothesis, which may have been discussed on this blog).
Hubble constant,
The Atiyah situation was different. In the last few years of his life he was suffering from a mild form of dementia, unable to follow complex arguments or understand what was a valid proof. I didn’t write about it on the blog, it seemed obviously best if everyone would just politely ignore his claims about proofs. It was too bad that some people publicly spread his claims about the Riemann hypothesis.
Penrose is different. Plenty of people with their faculties intact have dubious theories about cosmology and make unsupported claims about them (string cosmology anyone?). He’s been fond of contrarian ideas for a long time. Despite some effort, I never was able to completely understand how CCC was supposed to work.
I briefly met Roger last year. I know that not only is he a brilliant physicist, he’s also a great guy, absolute gold. He told me the Road to Reality was the most difficult book he ever wrote, and he almost didn’t finish it.
I’m actually going to defend some of his work on consciousness, which I think gets a raw deal. Before he met Stuart Hameroff, he wrote The Emperor’s New Mind which remains a brilliant book (got me interested in physics). He was one of the first leading physicists to take an interest in consciousness, which was a brave move at the time.
At the core of the book, he expressed something that we maybe all feel but no major scientist had really said before – that there really is something fundamentally different between how our brains feel – how it feels to be conscious – and the very basic operation of a computer which might superficially be appearing to be doing the same thing as our brain, but is almost certainly not conscious. There’s something there which needs explaining, and Roger was the first major scientist to express that.
Andrew Thomas,
I’m afraid I had the exact opposite reaction to The Emperor’s New Mind. First of all, lots of scientists have investigated the phenomenon and problem of consciousness, for a long time. Even just casually, I took an elective course on States of Consciousness in the early 1980s. And already back then people were investigating neural networks as working very differently from standard computers. To claim that Penrose was ‘the first major scientist’ to express that brains work differently from computers is wrong. (I don’t know how you are defining ‘first major scientist’. Brain biologists have know this for a very long time, and even John von Neumann seems to have realized this as far back as 1958.) Penrose seemed to have not bothered in the least to look up any research on consciousness. This doesn’t take away from his brilliant work in mathematical physics. But in the science of consciousness, he was not groundbreaking in the least.
Hi CWJ,
There has of course been plenty of interest in consciousness from philosophers and psychologists for centuries, going back to Descartes. But there was no interest from what we might call the hard scientists until the work of neuroscientist Christof Koch in the early 90s, and others such as Stanislas Dehaene who basically created the modern field. I know the history of this field pretty well. Penrose’s 1989 work predates them. I actually suspect he might have influenced their work and – if so – we should consider him the father of the modern field of consciousness studies.
I don’t know why you mention neural nets – yes, they don’t work like computers but that has nothing to do with consciousness. I was also working with neural nets in the early 90s – my PhD is in that area. There was never the slightest mention of consciousness. Yes, I know that he was obviously not the first to suggest that “brains work differently from computers”, but we’re not talking about structure, we’re talking about consciousness. As far as I am aware, Penrose was the first to consider if computers were conscious (Turing had earlier wondered if they were “intelligent” in the Turing test).
I believe Penrose was a genuine pioneer in this area, and we should give him credit.
Andrew Thomas,
Penrose was hardly the first skeptic of computer consciousness, or of fashionable reductionist theories of mind. He wasn’t even the first physicist to suggest a quantum theory of mind – though his specific ideas are highly original – and I think his theory achieved maximum potency only once he teamed up with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, who gave it biological concreteness by associating it with microtubules. But no doubt he opened quite a few minds, and gave skeptics of computationalism a new champion.
All,
Enough about Penrose and consciousness. I don’t want to moderate a discussion of that since I know nothing about it and also don’t want to learn more.
I have a semi-direct connection to RP through a “common friend” (I’m being deliberately vague here), and I’m relatively sure this book’s reason for being is both problematic and highly unhelpful in trying to understand Roger’s character and personality. I’ll try to be as polite as I can – let’s say that as far as I know, Roger is not your token gutter press cannon fodder, and so it’s not anyone whose life story can be transformed into an instant hit job, the kind of stuff people love to read about a scientist (in case you don’t know, people is interested in scientists life only when they’re alleged victims, alleged loonies or alleged sleaze – try writing about a scientist whose life is remotely normal without “spicing it up” and any publisher will reject your book proposal in a millisecond.
So, I think the author tried to spice up Roger’s life as much as possible. This is relatively commonplace in the world of celebrity biographies. Still, my understanding (and I’m being very cautious here) is that, well, being Roger now quite old, the circumstances surrounding the author’s access to Roger’s life details bear further scrutiny. I’m not implying anything illegal or such; it’s just that Roger may have mistaken the book’s scope when he did agree to talk with the author.
So, to sum it up, take the whole “Roger Penrose personal life story” part of the book with a massive pinch of salt. Or at least, that’s my understanding.
Luca Signorelli,
From the author’s own description, Penrose (who is 93) has severe vision problems, and lives alone, without anyone to watch out for his interests. It appears to me that in this situation the author took advantage of a vulnerable elderly person.
The details could be 100% accurate, and it would still be a disturbing and unseemly choice to publish this book, at least while the subject is still alive. I also find the whole account rather dreary and mundane, and entirely unhelpful in understanding anything of value about what makes Penrose interesting.
I do blame the fascination with people like Feynman for incentivizing such “humanizations” and I have, to some degree, been guilty of contributing my fair share of cash to keeping that cult alive. If Feynman is remembered as a narcissistic, sexist pig along with being a great physicist, well, he contributed as much as anyone in his autobiographical accounts to that cultivated persona. What did Penrose do to encourage dredging up petty embarrassments a half-century old? He’s no Feynman, and this book just makes me sad.
LMMI,
I don’t think the character assassination here becomes less problematic once the target passes away.
The last thing I want to do is to get involved in the “Richard Feynman, misogynist who should be canceled or not?” debate. I’m not a fan of moralistic attacks on people’s characters, especially not the version where one invokes present day moral values to attack people for how they lived in eras with different moral values.
While there’s nothing wrong with a Penrose biographer explaining why his first marriage was an unhappy one, the reasons this was unhappy seem to me generic ones afflicting late 1950s marriages.
it seems to me that he’s trying to make Penrose look bad for having a garden-variety late-1950s unhappy marriage. He’s turning having a standard problem common in one’s time into a moral failure
Re: the singularity theorems, I’m not so sure that the “creative ideas there were more Penrose’s, with Hawking much better at getting attention for his work”.
Remember that Hawking and Ellis published “The large scale structure of space-time” in 1973. This book was for many years the standard reference for the application of global techniques in general relativity, i.e. it provided a useful resource for researchers in the field rather than being a publicity stunt. (Penrose might be referring to the Hawking personality cult that resulted from the publication of “A Brief History of Time” in 1988, but as Jane Hawking explained in her book “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen”, that latter book arose from financial necessity rather than any need for attention or publicity.)
On twistors: it appears that much of the 20th century research was circulated via the twistor newsletter, and continued to be so for many years. A fellow PhD student was very interested in this material, so while on a visit to England in the early 1980s, I asked Penrose for copies. He refused to provide anything at all. So not “more likely to be friendly and helpful to others than your average academic” IMHO.
Peter Woit and Phil H
The Twistor Newsletter was originally partly handwritten when mathematical typesetting was very difficult and was mimeographed (manually rotary stencilled) for circulation. It included work by a range of mathematicians, was not intended to replace publication and could be speculative. The editions even up to the early 1980s ran to hundreds of paper pages. To me, with memories of circulating newsletters in those days, It is not surprising that even a man of Roger Penrose’ well known generosity rejected a request for copies of previous editions made on behalf of a third party.
On a more positive note, the entire archive is now freely available online thanks to the Oxford Mathematical Institute and its staff and contributors at:
https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/lmason/Tn/
“While Hawking often gets more attention for this, it seems that there’s a good case that the creative ideas there were more Penrose’s, ”
After reading both papers, I was definitely left with the impression that the ideas used to prove the singularity theorems are Penrose’s, while Hawking seems to have only applied those techniques to the case of a cosmological singularity.
Also, does anyone know if there has been a rebuttal to Roy Kerr’s claim that the singularity theorems do not prove the existence of actual singularities?
Alex:
there is a video at the Phil Halper YT channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foq4nVAwEao where some people, including Senovilla, Ashtekar, Warner and Penrose himself point to a crucial error Kerr made in his paper. I am not an expert, but they all seem to make a good point. Warner even plans to make it a homework problem in his future courses on GR: find the error in Kerr’s argument.
Re: the singularity theorems, I’m not so sure that the “creative ideas there were more Penrose’s, with Hawking much better at getting attention for his work”.
In their chapter on global techniques and singularity theorems, MTW’s Gravitation described in 1973 Penrose’s `pioneering theorem on singularities` of 1965 as `the birth of global techniques` (employed by the primary workers in the field Geroch, Ellis, Hawking, etc).
Kerr’s argument is wrong. See this answer on Physics Stack Exchange:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/791566/112768
All,
Sorry, but I’m not going to allow more comments debating the Kerr claims. This is a technical issue that has nothing to do with the book. From the limited amount I’ve done of looking into this, if there’s anything there, it’s a not very interesting issue about exactly what you mean by “singularity”.
On another physicist, Cambridge University Press has just released the online version of Steven Weinberg: A Life in Physics. Available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/steven-weinberg-a-life-in-physics/BB818FF83303ED57F5B1894A7CF5C178#
Recent talk at the Isaac Newton Institute by Penrose, “From the Origins of Twistor Theory to Bi-Twistors and Curved Space-Times” – https://youtu.be/wWRBX_UtIu8?si=YiySvD73D0MxAgQ1.
Brings the history up to date.
I met RP once at a GR centenary conference in King’s college, couldn’t get over how gentle and unassuming he was. We had a lovely quiet lunch together where he asked a lot about Dias and my late father. I met him again a few days later at another historical conference in Berlin, whereupon he treated me like an old friend!
By the way: Weinberg’s memoir, just published by Cambridge press, is very interesting.