That he is one of the world’s greatest scientists, does not stop him from being a skilled writer who has to his credit lucid books that take the lay person into the fascinating realms of high physics and metaphysics.
His book “The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe” lives up to the title while being within the reach of the intelligent and interested lay reader.
His two earlier books:”The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind” vividly bring alive the road that Penrose traveled before he could bring himself to write the complete guide to the laws of the universe.
There is a concept in “The Road to Reality” that continues to fascinate me and I go back to it often.
Penrose calls the concept “Three worlds and three deep mysteries”.
And yet there are deep and mysterious connections between the three worlds.
Only a small part of mathematics has relevance to the physical world.
The vast preponderance of the activities of mathematicians today has no connection to physics or to any other science.
Implied, I think, in Penrose’s visualization of this connection as reproduced in this post is that the world of mathematics can explain the whole of the physical world.
The second mysterious connection is that the Mental World comes about in certain physical structures that are a small-subset of the physical world (most specifically, healthy, wakeful human brains- and to smaller extent the “brains” of other living things).
Think about the above two mysteries in conjunction with the third mystery which is that the Mathematics World is only a small sub-set of the Mental World and you get a cycle that folds on to itself and gives me, when I meditate on it, a deeper glimpse of reality.
If you don’t hate thinking, take the time to think about it. It could be worth your while.
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