The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

Description

'A truly remarkable book...this is just the sort of book that could inspire mathematical awakenings' - Sunday Times **WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book. Roger Penrose's purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. The Road to Reality is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. In a single work of colossal scope one of the world's greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe that we all inhabit. 'Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He is one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius' Lee Smolin

Roger Penrose is one the world's foremost theoretical physicists, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. He has won numerous other prizes, including the Albert Einstein Medal, for his fundamental contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is the bestselling author of The Road to Reality- A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Cycles of Time- An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. His other books include Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, The Emperor's New Mind, Shadows of the Mind and, with Stephen Hawking, The Nature of Space and Time. He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, and lives in Oxford.

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists. Genuinely magnificent and stimulating * Scotland on Sunday * Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow * Independent * This is a tour de force that is unlikely to be bettered this decade * Financial Times *