★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius

Patchen Barss

If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, and Roger Penrose. (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute, announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss, a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose, I immediately snagged a ticket.

Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there exist humans who are really genuinely interested in science? I will grant that such people are a minority of the population at large, but are they a minority of those who are likely to read a biography of Roger Penrose? Not obvious, in my opinion.

It's not that I'm uninterested in human stories, but novelists have that literary ground covered. If you're about to complain that novels are fiction, allow me to point out that theoretical physics is no more real. Most theoretical physics is done by working with simplified fictional models of reality. So, Penrose has a human story, it's told in rather too much detail here, and it is honestly just not all that interesting. Penrose was self-centered and selfish in a way that many men are.

If you didn't understand Penrose's work as a physicist, you would have a hard time learning it here. I, however, have long been interested in Penrose and have read several of his books, so I was able to fill in from my own knowledge.

Penrose is a brilliant geometer. Barss tells a story about this. One night Penrose gathered with a bunch of students at one of the student's homes for a movie night -- this was a regular thing. That night they had decided to share ice cream. Someone brought boxes of ice cream. They found that the student didn't have freezer space for all the ice cream. It was clearly impossible to get all that ice cream into that tiny freezer. Then this happened:

The crowd looked on as [Penrose] shifted items around the freezer and fridge. It dawned on David exactly what they were witnessing. “Over about fifteen seconds, we went from one state of mind to another. First, we were sure that he couldn’t possibly fit it all in there because we couldn’t. Then it looked as though he was making headway. And then we had a funny moment when we looked at each other and realized we had just asked the world’s leading expert on packing things to pack the ice cream into my freezer. And sure enough, he managed it. It was an impossible task, but he managed it.”

So, the Impossible Man.

Now, Einstein's theory of general relativity is all about geometry. Thus Penrose was able to figure out such puzzles as how to pack tiles together to cover a plane with pentagons, but also to prove that black holes must form when a big star collapses. It was a three-page paper published in 1964, and in 2020 it won him a Nobel Prize. (Interestingly Penrose proved this just after Belinsky, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz proved that it was almost impossible for a black hole to form. Lifshitz found the error in his proof and published it soon after.)

Towards the end of his life Penrose fell into a trap that catches many of the most prominent scientists. He was so charismatic and so respected that there was no longer anyone who could tell him when he had gone off the rails. He became certain that he KNEW the answers to some questions, and that is death for a scientist. The first such step was his book The Emperor's New Mind, in which he proposed that consciousness is an effect of quantum mechanics.

The Emperor's New Mind was the first book of Penrose's that I read. I was by nature strongly resistant to his view that machine consciousness is impossible -- it smacks of vitalism, which I abhor. But I was impressed by the first half of the book. Penrose convinced me of things that I didn't think I could be convinced of. And then he began to discuss neuroscience, and the book fell off a cliff. I am a neuroscientist, so I am qualified to have opinions on the subject, and it was obvious that Penrose really fundamentally didn't understand certain things about how brains work. It's a great book. It's wrong, but it's brilliantly wrong. Daniel Dennett, who reviewed it, called it

the ultimate academic shaggy dog story, a tale whose fascinating digressions outweigh the punch line by a large factor.

and also said,

Penrose is wrong in a pretty interesting and clear way. I mean this not in a backhanded way at all. If you can make a really clear and tantalizing mistake, that’s very useful. Many of the advances of science have come from the correcting of other people’s mistakes

Penrose also may have gone off the rails as a physicist. His Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe is another brilliant and, I suspect, brilliantly wrong, book.

The Impossible Man is, in my opinion, an adequate but not superb biography of Roger Penrose. It is also, by virtue of being the only one, the best biography of Penrose. I wish I had not had to slog through the many, many pages about Penrose's personal relationships, but I am not sorry I read it. But if you want to understand Roger Penrose, you should read his books in addition to this biography.

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