The Impossible Man

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.