The Impossible Man
On Patchen Barrs’ Biography of Roger Penrose
If ever there was someone who could be called sui generis, it was Roger Penrose.
His father, Lionel, was a renowned polymathic genius. One of his brothers won the British Chess championship ten times. Another brother (Oliver) was an eminent professor of mathematical physics. There were distinguished mathematicians and artists in the family tree. Roger is fond of (and famous for) illustrating his most esoteric, serious ideas with strikingly original geometric drawings. I once asked Sean Carroll, who had introduced and referred to him in one of his public lectures as “the artist, Roger Penrose” why he had identified Penrose (who had never been acknowledged as a professional artist) that way (rather than as a world-famous Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist), and he replied, “It was a joke.”
As a youngster, Penrose was so original, so into looking at things from his own perspective, that he was initially misunderstood and underrated by his teachers. He seemed to take an unusually long time to finish routine classroom assignments. His teachers wondered if he was “slow,” as did Penrose himself: “My mind seemed to work much slower than my classmates.” There was a growing consensus in middle school that it might be best if he would be held back a year. He was saved by an intuitive teacher who wondered if the problem — rather than an innate cognitive deficiency — was perhaps a super abundance of imagination. What if Roger Penrose didn’t so much answer questions, as muse about them? What if he wasn’t so much trying to get a good grade as — something almost no one does when taking an important test — searching for underlying, hidden deeper meanings? Inspired by his hunch, the teacher allowed Roger to retake the test (which he had failed dismally) but this time allowed him to take all the time he wanted. The hunch paid off. Roger went from getting close to zero to getting every question right. The same strategy paid off several years later when it came time for him to choose between medicine (the choice his father practically demanded) and mathematics — Penrose’s clear preference. Lionel (hoping to convince his son of the error of his ways) arranged for a very special entrance test to be administered to Roger: He would be given all the time in the world to correctly solve a series of very challenging, advanced mathematical problems. In order to qualify for admission to the university (Cambridge) all Penrose had to do was get one of these super problems right; And he had a whole day to do it. Penrose not only rose to the challenge, he got every single problem right. A star was born! From the beginning, a pattern would be set. Whatever he tackled, he would begin by reimagining and trying to reinvent the question so as to better understand it. As Sean Carroll would later say, in another lecture, Roger Penrose completely changed the way astronomers conceptualize the passage of light (by introducing the geometric figure of the light cone). Puzzled as to the cumbersome way the passage of light was then traditionally depicted, Penrose devised the (then) radical conception of the light cone. He showed it to his older brother Oliver (the Professor), who was impressed but puzzled, and suggested he show it to his friend Dennis Sciama, a leading figure in contemporary British cosmology. Sciama, quick to realize Penrose had a once in a lifetime originality, would become a lifelong champion of Penrose and a personal friend. Stories abound about Penrose’s creativity.
In 1972 the international physics community had sufficient talent — and ego — to ensure there was no consensus as to who was the smartest person in the room; But within that elite group, many people recognized Roger Penrose’s highly unusual abilities. “Roger’s math had something magic about it,” recalled Rainer Sachs, the German-born cosmologist who had watched Roger Penrose’s reputation grow through his collaborations with Steven Hawking. “Comparing the two, I always felt Hawking’s calculations were comparatively straight forward — had I been smarter, better educated, more focused and harder working I might have come up with some of them. Roger’s were completely alien. Never could I have started one of his calculations — which always seem to begin with an epiphany. Hawking was a human genius. I was just so impressed with Penrose’s insights which seemed to stem from some superhuman life form.”
Many relativists had a powerful feel for formal math — errors and calculations leapt out at them the way off-key notes rankled a musician’s ear. Not Roger. Equations required too much mental labor and restricted his creativity. His “magic” came from the shape of things. He preferred to run his fingers along the curves and twists of space and time and find in those graceful lines the story of how every particle, force, and phenomenon acquired its properties.
Complex geometry, with its poetic mix of real and imaginary numbers held one key to unlock the relationship between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Conformal geometry, with its scaled invariants and preserved angles contained another. Together, they offer passage into the mathematical world “hiding behind the real world.”
Geometry had as much — or more — material reality as a piece of chalk or a wine bottle. Roger could manipulate and shift his mathematical constructions with an ease that seemed otherworldly to those around him.
‘I know no one who even approaches him in intuitive feel for the content of alternative formulations of geometry, and no one who comes close in his lectures and writings [to bringing such a wealth of insights to the service of his colleagues.] I count him as a unique asset to the world of learning,” John Wheeler, wrote of him in 1972. Wheeler, a titan of American theoretical physics, was influential, not only for his own science, but for his ability to identify and encourage talent in those around him. He could name fewer than five scientists anywhere in the world who could come close to equaling Roger’s accomplishments and potential. That year, Roger was under consideration for election to the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s prestigious National Academy of Science. “If the Royal Society wants the most distinguished man easily named in the field of mathematical physics, it should lose no time in electing Roger Penrose,” Wheeler told the selection committee.
Wheeler was trying to lure Roger from London to Princeton, but Roger’s memories of Texas put him off moving to America permanently, much to Wheeler’s disappointment. “I must say it has taken me some time to become adjusted to the sad thought that there are factors about this country which rule it out for you in the years immediately ahead,” he wrote to Roger. “If outlooks were to change…I personally would hope that somehow or other it might be possible to renew the proposal which we have just been discussing back and forth across the Atlantic so seriously.”
Like his floating astronaut, Roger reached a point where he could take a moment to survey his surroundings and appreciate the unexpected places his journey had taken him. The concepts that bore his name — the Penrose triangle, the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, Penrose Diagrams, the Penrose-Newman Constants, and Penrose Notation — had made him a prominent and successful “brand” within the world of mathematical physics. Roger pushed further into unexplored territory letting Twister theory (which he had invented) lead him closer to the fundamental geometric nature of reality — even as forces beyond his control threatened to tear his life apart. On top of everything else, Roger’s marriage to Joan was falling apart. Roger had fallen in love with one of his students (Judith). While Roger waited for his telegram to have the desired results, a letter Judith had written weeks earlier arrived at his office at the university. She had mailed it to Bayfield, where it had just missed him. After several days of delay, it had at last made its way to Boston. Two more letters arrived the next day. His calm and optimism returned. He was so delighted to hear from her that it took him several readings for him to notice that she was still angry with him. She rejected his dismissal of their history and his marriage as “mere practicalities.” And she cared even less for his analysis of her “demons” and “fantasies.”
“Only two things I’ll say now…firstly, I’m very glad that you reject the ‘fantasy’ solution to the problem,” she wrote. “We are both too honest to have a very superficial relationship based on preserving each other’s fantasies. Secondly…I disagree (as you thought I would) with your analysis of my feelings, or most of it anyway.”
He apologized for his “two-bit psychiatry” but expressed no regret about his earlier letters, given how important she was to his work. He was embarrassed. His telegram had revealed what a worry-nut he could be but he carried on psychoanalyzing away at Judith’s resistance to their relationship.
JUDITH DANIELS
Penrose, although married and with children, began to feel he had made a mistake in marrying Joan (his first wife, who felt the same way). The difference was Penrose was looking for a safe way to get out of the marriage while Judith was looking for a way to hold on to what she had.
Judith, a young candidate for a degree in theoretical physics with Penrose as her supervisor, seemed to be the answer. Judith, who had been worshipping Penrose for years, was clear on one thing: She did not want a romantic, physical relationship with the octogenarian and profoundly idiosyncratic Penrose. When Penrose, after controlling himself for about ten years, finally made his move — leaning over to kiss her for the first time — she stopped him in his tracks. She reminds him about Colin, her boyfriend (whom she will later marry briefly). Hasn’t she told him, on various occasions, that she does not want a physical relationship with him? Someone she sees as a father figure? Bewildered at what he considers a classic case of mixed signals, Penrose (perhaps the only time in his life) explodes — taking a nearby bottle of wine and smashing it against his leg. Fortunately, it does not break, but it is the end of their fantasy romance.
One of the many virtues of Patchen Barss’ biography is the considerable length and detail he devotes to Penrose’s profound need to be supported by a female muse in his heroic quest to tackle and solve the biggest questions of the universe. In his long and glorious career (still strong at 92) Penrose will win the Nobel Prize in physics (2020), be knighted by Queen Elizabeth, receive the order of merit from Britain — just one of 25 living people to do so — and many other major honors. He has consistently sought out the biggest fundamental problems in physics and searched for the simplest, most unifying answers. The area he specializes in — spacetime — is considered least accessible to the contemporary technological wonders of particle physics. The basic building blocks of his unique theory (what he calls twisters) do not have: emotions; emotional experiences; desires, interests; have no stake in existence, no existential qualities; do not collaborate or relate; are not relational, transactional, goal-oriented / ambitious; they are not educable, i.e., they cannot learn; they are not pragmatic or self-interested; not time-sensitive or personal; they have no GPS; they have no measurement problem.
This novel spacetime unit (twisters) is in stark contrast to conventional physical objects. You can just walk around the object in your mind, you can’t do that with a number. It doesn’t immerse you like a wave. It doesn’t have definite boundaries; It is transient, it is shapeshifting, it is in motion; It is inherently dynamical; it has history (there is an origin story). It isn’t personal (you engage with it, it doesn’t engage with you). It doesn’t have needs, it is not dependent on you for its continued existence; It’s not acquisitive, not directional, intentional, or sensible; it’s not narrative, impulsive, or self-contained; it’s not inhuman or materialistic.
Roger knew other cosmologists weren’t going to like his explanation of how gravity arrived at that highly structured state. “There is a profound oddness underlying the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the very nature of the Big Bang. In relationship to this, I am putting forward a body of speculation of my own, which brings together many strands of different aspects of the universe we know,” he wrote. “The scheme I am now arguing for here is, indeed, unorthodox, yet it is based on geometrical and physical ideas which are very soundly based.”
He asked physicists to let go of the very idea that the universe began with the Big Bang. The low-entropy universe didn’t just burst into existence 13.7 billion years ago, the story began much earlier. To prove it, he returned to one of his favorite areas of mathematics: conformal geometry.
He let his mind drift once more to the distant future. The universe, as a whole, was expanding; but gravity would cause denser regions within that expanse — galaxies and galaxy clusters — to collapse. The incessant pull turned old galaxies into new quasars. Ravenous blackholes absorbed billions or trillions of solar masses’ worth of material. Stars winked out of existence. Behind ever-growing event horizons, information was destroyed forever. The universe grew so cold and empty, hyper-massive black holes began to boil away with Hawking radiation. It might take a googol years before the largest blackholes completely evaporated. Leaving the universe sparsely populated with high-entropy radiation — an endless expanse of massless photons.
“The thing that started me off was really thinking about the photons and how boring the remote future was going to be. All the blackholes gone. Just these photons drifting forever and ever and ever. This just struck me as incredibly boring. This is a very emotional argument, if you like. But then I thought ‘who’s going to be bored in this universe?’ Well, mainly photons. But it’s very hard to bore a photon. Not because a photon presumably has no actual experiences. That was not the point. The point is that time for a photon is always zero. You just look at the way time dilation works: the time with respect to that photon from creation right through to infinity is zero. So, where do these photons go? They don’t want to be cut off from existence. Is there something on the other side? What could it be? That was the point, or I thought, ‘Hey, could it be a stretched out Big Bang?’ Massless particles do not experience time. They also don’t experience space. In a universe full of only photons, distance and scale cease to exist.”
Roger let his mind drift backwards. 13.7 billion years to the cosmic pinpoint that supposedly started it all, when the universe was trillions of degrees too hot for matter to form. It, too, was filled with massless particles. It, too, had no clocks and no rulers. The beginning and the end were both conformally invariant. At each terminus, scale disappeared. Viewed through the lens of conformal geometry, each was indistinguishable from the other.
He recalled M.C. Escher’s iconic lithograph “Print Gallery”. A boy stands in a gallery looking at a print of a cityscape. The lines curve ever outwards, the gallery print expanding into an actual city. The city contains the gallery and the gallery contains the boy looking at the print of the cityscape. The image expands endlessly and cyclically, passing through the same starting point.
Could this be the shape of the universe? If he could look far enough into the future, would he see the back of his own head? Would he see another universe entirely? Had he found a clever mathematical trick or a physical truth? A world-behind-the-world? A place where curves and angles have greater reality than even time and space? The realm Roger spent a lifetime escaping to might actually exist at the beginning and the end. These two distant extremes might be one and the same.
He hovered where the birth and the death of the universe bled into one another. He traveled further back and further forward to other scaled invariant transitions. An endless cycle of heat death and fiery rebirth. Non-stop expansion. Entropy would always increase, but every so often the perspective would change — a conformal “zoom out” to infinity — such that the large became tiny, cold became hot, old became new, and the cycles began again.
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) was a difficult sell. To make it work, every last massive particle — all the electrons, protons, and neutrinos, plus all the dark matter — had to be eliminated from the universe. Not all of it would fall into blackholes. He required some other physical mechanism to cause rogue particles to “fade away.” He also struggled with the question of falsifiability. Would it be anymore possible to test the existence of previous universes than parallel universes? What happened to time’s arrow during the transition from one aeon to the next? How could a new universe begin after time had been eliminated from reality? As it drifted through the transition from a dying universe to a cosmos reborn, these challenges all seemed manageable. The story was too powerful, too beautiful, too elegant to be wrong.
Conformal Cyclic Geometry eliminated the need for inflation and Stephen Hawking’s cosmological singularity. The expansion required to homogenize and flatten the universe no longer had to happen in a tiny fraction of a second. Gravity naturally emerged into a new aeon in an extreme low-entropy state — resolving Roger’s questions about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a new universe spilled out quarks and gluons, cosmic radiation, stars and galaxies, hot spots and cool spots, rivers and volcanoes — entropy never stopped increasing. The Second Law could carry on for eternity.
In 2010, he published his fourth popular science book, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. He continued to highlight his disagreements with Hawking. “Hawking himself has been one of the strongest proponents of the viewpoint that information is indeed lost in blackholes.” Yet at the 17thInternational Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held in Dublin in 2004, Hawking announced he had changed his mind and publicly forfeited a bet that he and Kip Thorne had made with John Presskill, arguing that he had been mistaken and that he now believed that the information must, in fact, all be retrieved externally to the hole. “It is certainly my personal opinion that Hawking should have stuck to his guns and that his earlier viewpoint is far closer to the truth.”
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People weren’t sure what to do with CCC. Reviewers called Cycles of Time “heretical”, “radical”, “speculative”, “unorthodox”, “not for the faint hearted”, “abstruse”, “an intellectual thrill ride”, “controversial”, and “a quite extraordinary hypothesis.”
Roger did find the prospect of heat death boring and depressing. CCC appealed to him first aesthetically, only later did he become convinced it was true. In academic circles, CCC was met with confusion, discomfort, and an uneasy sense that its author had gone “off the rails.”
Roger dug in.
He told other physicists exactly where to go look for evidence of CCC. At the end of an aeon, conformal geometry compressed the unimaginably slow evaporation of a blackhole into a near-instantaneous burst of energy. The blast would be powerful enough to pierce the transition between aeons, reverberate through opaque plasma for 379,000 years, and manifest as detectable patterns in the CMB (cosmic microwave background). “The supermassive blackhole radiation comes bursting through. What does it do? All the Hawking radiation stretches out through regions, which looks like about four degrees in the sky…about eight times the moons diameter,” Roger Said. Such spots wouldn’t be warmer or cooler than the rest of the CMB but would have less variation over all in energy levels. In a 2018 paper, published just five months after Stephen Hawking died, he suggested these spots be known as Hawking Points, ostensibly in recognition of Stephen’s contribution to the theory. Were Stephen Hawking alive, though, he would have wanted nothing to do with CCC. The name struck some scientists as more opportunistic than collegial. “He called them Hawking Points, which I find kind of distasteful because Stephen Hawking had just died. If it was done for publicity purposes, Roger Penrose didn’t need publicity,” said Douglas Scott, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
Scott was one of many physicists who accepted Roger’s challenge to test CCC. More out of respect for the man, than the idea itself. “It was only a prediction because Roger said it was a prediction. Nobody else understood why there would be a low-variance circle in the sky. And there is no chain of reasoning that says whether or not you detect these things, rules out, or rules in, CCC. But, he said it was a prediction so we went off and tested it,” Scott said.
His team’s analysis turned up no evidence of patterns in the CMB that matched Roger’s description. By the time they published their response, Roger had already posited another prediction. At a lecture at Princeton, celebrating 50 years since the discovery of the CMB, he said there should be concentric rings of low-variance energy in the CMB that were also remnants of the previous aeon.
Scott was in the audience and, once again, gave Roger the benefit of the doubt. “I was in two minds of wondering whether to say anything or just keep my mouth shut. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, ‘You know, if you really think there are multiple rings we’ll look for them.’” He put an undergraduate student on the project to go look for these rings, who did, in fact, find ring-like patterns in the radiation map but did not find any reason to connect them to CCC. In anything as complex and detailed as the maps of the CMB, such patterns could easily arise randomly.
Princeton physicist David Spergel faired similarly. “Roger reached out to me on the CCC stuff. I was leading the analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data at the time, and he asked me whether I would collaborate on it. I encouraged Amir Hajian, one of the postdocs on my team, to work with him. Amir didn’t find the pattern that Roger was looking for. He didn’t see what Roger wanted. Roger refused to publish. He didn’t want to hear that it wasn’t there.”
There was no surprise and no joy amongst scientists refuting Roger’s theory. He was liked and respected which made it all the worse. “I have seen a phenomenon in many brilliant scientists who were able to accomplish a lot by not listening to people and going their own original path. But as they get older they should be listening more. Instead, they listen less,” Spergel said. “You run out of people telling you when you’re being an idiot because there’s nobody above you anymore in the scientific food chain. When you’re young there’s a bunch of your colleagues who are equally smart and they say, ‘hold on a minute, what the hell was that?’”
As Roger increasingly ignored his critics, he also stopped listening. He no longer cared if his ideas made no sense to anyone. He became hyper-focused on finding anyone who would give his ideas a sympathetic hearing. Despite responses from people like Douglas Scott and David Spergel, he was convinced the scientific community was ignoring him. “There’s something rather nice about being wrong. If you find out you were wrong about something, it can open things up. You think, ‘I’ve been going on the wrong track, that’s why I was stuck.’ That has happened to me. What I don’t like is what is happening with my cosmology stuff. How much attention does it get? Zero. Now that is spooky. If there was something wrong with it, they should tell you. If there’s not something wrong with it, they should say, ‘gosh, that’s a good idea.’ I don’t find anything pro and con, I just find zero. And I find that extremely frustrating.”
In addition to academic responses, CCC was covered widely in popular science and media, as well as by PBS, the BBC, the New York Times, multiple high-profile YouTubers and bloggers, and major newspapers around the world. Nothing could shake Roger’s sense, though, that he was being ignored.
That sense might have been exacerbated by one of his other major ideas getting lost in the shuffle of a Noble Prize-winning discovery. Back in 1982, a few years after Roger had published his five-axis aperiodic Penrose tiles, an Israeli crystallographer named Daniel Schectman, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever before seen. These structures, which Schectman called, quasi-crystals, shared the pentagonal geometry of Penrose tiles, an atomic arrangement previously dismissed as impossible. It was as though Roger had invented a fantastic species of animal and zoologists had then found that very creature living in the wild. So, in 2011, Schectman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasi-crystals. Roger’s work was not recognized. “I thought it was outrageous the way the chemist wrote him out of the story in the citation for the Nobel Prize,” said Lionel Mason, Penrose’s longtime colleague at the Oxford Mathematic Institute. “Of course, the problem there was that he published his quasi-crystals in a recreational mathematics journal.”
Schectman described Roger’s influence on his quasi-crystal discovery similarly to how Roger described Kepler’s back-of-the-mind effect on his development of his tiles. “I was familiar with Penrose tiles, of course,” Schectman said. But he wasn’t consciously thinking of them as he did his research. “I didn’t know what it was. I repeated my experiments time and again over the next months. At the end of my sabbatical, I knew exactly what it was not, but I still didn’t know what it was.”
From Keppler to Penrose to Schectman, pentagons kept reappearing and revealing new secrets. In this case, Roger was satisfied to let the shapes that he had originated have a life of their own. He consulted on many architectural projects related to Penrose tiles but never pursued prizes or commissions. He did enjoy his growing celebrity. In North America, across Europe, in India and Australia, crowds lined up for hours for a chance to hear him speak. Fans asked for autographs, and he appeared regularly on the BBC and other major media. He felt very well-rewarded.
Only with his newer, less adulated ideas did he feel shortchanged.
With each year, Roger became more unrelenting. He refused to slow down. He accepted endless media requests and speaking engagements and maintained a punishing travel schedule well into his eighties. An entire world of fans, friends, and colleagues enabled and encouraged him to keep traveling and speaking. His eyes dimmed, his blood pressure increased, his memory grew less reliable. Friends and family watched Roger’s reputation fade while Roger worried he wasn’t working quickly enough to shore it up. He repeatedly expressed the fear that he suffer the same fate as the German climatologist Alfred Wegener. In 1912, Wegener hypothesized that continents more incrementally around the surface of the planet, were changing oceanic boundaries in rising up mountain ranges. Critics treated his theory as at least as crazy as anything Roger put in his books, no known physical mechanism could cause such movements. Wegener died years before his continental drift theory was vindicated. Roger couldn’t bear the thought of twister theory, orchestrated objective reduction, or CCC suffering the same fate. He needed them taken seriously in his own lifetime — if only to ensure work on them continued after he was gone.
“I’m not particularly interested in putting myself forward as a historical figure,” he said, “I am very concerned that these ideas not get lost.” Roger knew other cosmologists weren’t going to like his explanation of how gravity arrived at that highly structured state.
“On the afternoon of October the 5, 2018, I sat at a crumb-covered table in Roger Penrose’s flat about to conduct the first interview for this book.
Roger moved around his kitchen preparing tea and biscuits. He left the lights off. Macular degeneration had left him nearly blind. He navigated mostly by touch and memory. Gray autumn light filtered in through the windows, which overlooked the canal where narrow boats and swans passed unhurriedly. Stacks of moving boxes filled various corners of his flat, and framed prints and paintings leaned against walls, waiting to be hung.
He instinctively picked up a copy of the tetrahedral puzzle he had designed during his undergraduate years. He slid out a piece that locked several others in place, and six irregularly shaped multicolored chunks of plastic clattered onto the table.
He shuffled the pieces around as we talked, feeling out small bumps and indentations that provided clues about how they fit back together. Meanwhile, he wandered from story to story, subject to subject, attempting to assemble the key fragments of his disjointed life. He drifted between cosmology, artificial intelligence, crystallography, blackhole physics, and chess puzzles. He talked about higher-dimensional Platonic Solids, alternatives to the standard twelve-note octave, the death of his mother, and the influence of Dennis Sciama. Every new tangent left a previous thought unfinished. When he got more comfortable, he disclosed that he and Vanessa had recently separated. Alone for the first time in more than 30 years, he insisted solitude just gave him more time for research.
As he spoke, his hands appeared to be running on a separate system. They kept working the pieces of the puzzle, turning and interlocking until, with no flourish whatsoever, he slid the final three pieces simultaneously into place. He once again held a smooth tetrahedron, about four inches high. With barely an acknowledgement, he broke the pyramid apart and started again. ‘It’s all complicated and it’s all connected,’ he said.
He gave me a tour of the geometric puzzles, games, and oddities he’d amassed through a lifetime of mathematical play; plastic gears and wooden tiles, multicolored resin cubes that unfolded into jagged shapes, a Klein bottle, a collection of tiny cardboard polyhedra he’d made as a child. There was no sign of his many awards, medals, and plaques, which were stowed out of sight. These toys were the badges of pride in the light he chose to display. In the years that followed, Roger and I spoke for hundreds of hours by phone, video conference, and in person. I met his siblings, sons, colleagues, and former spouses. I read his published and unpublished writing. Each interview, notebook page, and old fax added a new piece to the puzzle. The process by which a human being emerges from there constituent parts — be they quarks and electrons or stories and memories — works differently from a jigsaw. The moment never comes when the last piece clicks into place and the puzzle is complete.
On a snowy day in February 2019, Roger and I walked from his flat to the Ashmolean Museum where Roger’s collection of M.C. Escher prints was on long-term loan. I reached out to help steady him on a steep hill where broken ice covered an already treacherous stretch of pavement. He brushed me back. ‘If I fall, you can help me up,’ he bristled, jamming his walking stick into the ice and carrying on.
Later, on the same walk, he paused in the chilly air. ‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It’s a theory I think about. I don’t think it’s true but I think there’s something to it…What if people alive today are visitors from the future who bought tickets to come back and have a 21st century experience?’ He absolutely did not believe consciousness could jump through time or from body to body. He just liked thinking about the idea. It helped him make sense of his experiences. Imagining himself as a ticket-holding consciousness from the future reinforced his self-image as a spectator to, rather than the architect of, his own story. He had trouble taking credit (and responsibility) for his extraordinary life: He hadn’t designed the laws of physics that governed how his future unfolded. I asked him more than once how he had evolved from a relatively obscure, pure mathematician to become Roger Penrose, famed creator of impossible objects, tamer of infinities, and storyteller of the universe.
‘It would have been stranger had I become anyone else.’
I asked him if he considered himself a generally happy, unhappy, or neutral person. With long pauses, he said, ‘Listen to the opening of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. It’s happy and sad at the same time.”
We walked up and down Oxford streets, visiting the office he still kept at the Mathematical Institute, various flats where he’d once lived, the two campus areas paved in Penrose tiles, the bakery that made his favorite seed bread, and muddy wooded paths along the city’s waterways where he took his daily walks. He showed me the “Nick Woodhouse shortcut” he’d named for another Oxford mathematics professor, which entailed squeezing through a gap between a fence and a building to cut off about two meters of the walk across campus.”
For whom, then, is this book for?
It’s for anyone and everyone who is curious about the vicissitudes, the Sturm and the Drang of creative genius.
Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
