Patchen Barss: The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius. (2024)
Sat, Dec 14, 2024./noise/books | LinkKindle. I was hoping to get some understanding of Penrose's big ideas but the vast bulk of this biography is about his personal life. It is annoyingly repetitive at all scales. I found it hard to track where we were in time; often a few decades slid past, content-free apart from a change of wife/muse. Apparently Penrose slid into crankdom from the late 1980s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". This work was done by 1964.
Barss was obviously the wrong person for this job as he has very little grip on most of the concepts he throws around. This is disappointing as there are a few that he provides very helpful intuition for, and there is a vast literature of engagement with Penrose's ideas from all angles. (See, for instance, John McCarthy on The Emperor's New Mind.) I was bewildered by why anyone who grasps Gödel's theorem would think that it implies machines are incapable of human-level insight and reasoning; as Alan Turing observed in 1950 we are so obviously inconsistent and so often unwilling to extend the benefits of inconsistency to machines. McCarthy also argues for non-monotonicity. This book is no help on those or any other front. I expected more imagery in a biography of a geometer.
The overly brief coverage of Penrose tiles is poor for something published this recently. Barss overstates their merits:
Two simple shapes cracked and divided the infinite plane, exploding ever outwards in unending variety. No tile set could approach their extraordinary, unexpected simplicity.
How could any science journalist/writer be oblivious to the hat and the sceptre of 2023?
Prompted by Jennifer Szalai's review in the New York Times. Their book reviews have been more miss than hit for so long now. She made it seem that there is a lot more science in it than there is. Goodreads is divided into those looking for the ideas and those who like pop psychoanalytic takes on geniuses. Peter Woit: exploitative of an elderly man with failing eyesight. Just read the Wikipedia page on Penrose.
