At one point in Patchen Barss’s new biography of Roger Penrose, we find the author seated at a table in the Oxford flat of his subject, about to interview him for the first time. It is 2018. The celebrated mathematical physicist, then 87 and still two years away from winning the Nobel Prize, is in the kitchen preparing tea and biscuits.
It’s a stereotypical English moment, yet the apparent ordinariness is deceptive, like the opening to a Lewis Carroll story. In short order, their conversation draws Barss into Penrose’s Alice-in-Wonderland world of puzzles and illusions – and then further along to black holes, cosmology and the more challenging calculus of human relationships.
While it’s an introduction that we experience through the biographer’s eye, it appears near the end of The Impossible Man rather than at the beginning of the book.
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“It was something I thought a lot about when I was writing,” Barss said in an interview. “I put it in and took it out. I had it at different places.”
In the end, the scene lands exactly when it happens in the chronology of Roger Penrose’s life as one of the era’s most unique and agile thinkers.
By then, there is a poignancy to it. Barss’s subject is well known for his work in theoretical physics as well as contributions to popular science, including Penrose tiles – geometric shapes that have the surprising property of covering a plane without producing a repeating pattern. What the book reveals is the human figure hidden inside the equations.
In a way that is reminiscent of Penrose’s eponymous tiles, Barss builds his portrait through the meticulous placement of individual moments. They fit together seamlessly, yet the pattern they create is perpetually unresolved. So it also is with Penrose the man.
Behind the towering intellectual lies a lifelong struggle to connect with those closest to him – a struggle initiated in childhood by parents that were emotionally inaccessible and then later exacerbated by Penrose’s introversion, ambition and retreats into work and the distractions of academic fame.
Science journalist Patchen Barss at the Field Institute, University of Toronto, on Nov. 26, 2024.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
As Penrose puts it during that first meeting with Barss as he absently works on a puzzle, “It’s all complicated and it’s all connected.” Six years on, Barrs has assembled the pieces. The result is fascinating.
A point of disclosure: I know Barss as a fellow science journalist and have long admired his work.
The project that became The Impossible Man began when Barss recognized that Penrose, a well-known scientist and author whose influence ranges from theoretical physics to popular mathematics, had never been the subject of a biography.
Unlike his one-time collaborator Stephen Hawking, Penrose offered a comparatively unexamined version of genius hiding in plain sight. That it took a Canadian writer to spot the discrepancy is fitting. Penrose spent an important part of his childhood in Southwestern Ontario and he would return there at various points as an adult because of personal and professional ties.
When he sits down with Barss for the first time, Penrose is recently separately from his second wife and is living alone for the first time in more than 30 years. Hampered by macular degeneration, he moves around his kitchen by memory rather than sight. But it’s clear he is not merely entertaining a curious guest. He earnestly desires to have his insights grasped by others and he is ready for a committed storyteller to unpack it all.
“I am not particularly interested in putting myself forward as a historical figure,” he tells Barss at one point. “I am very concerned that these ideas not get lost.”
Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, England, in 1931. The second of four children, he grew up privileged but in a family atmosphere defined by personal isolation. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a biochemist and a concert pianist. She had practised medicine – an exception among educated women at that time. But her career, along with any further avenues for personal expression, were unfailingly discouraged by her husband. The son of a wealthy Quaker family, Lionel Penrose had followed his wife’s path to becoming a doctor and would ultimately enjoy the professional status that she was denied.
Medicine brought the Penrose family to London, Ont., in 1939, where his father secured a position as a hospital physician during the Second World War. For the next six years Penrose and his siblings lived an idyllic Southwestern Ontario childhood far beyond the reach of The Blitz.
It was there that he began to develop his affinity for all things mathematical, encouraged in part by the realization that geometry and chess offered ways to bond with a father who eschewed displays of warmth and affection.
But disapproval was never far away. In high school, when Penrose opted to study mathematics instead of biology, both parents reacted with anger. It was not simply that he was turning away from the subject that would lead naturally to a future in medicine, it was that he might well end up a physicist, a maker of bombs. Penrose was not to be dissuaded. He had no interest in weapons but he could not bear to forego the joy that came from doing mathematics.
That joy resurfaces throughout the book when Penrose is immersed in the ideas that will define his eclectic career. Some have achieved pop status, including the “Penrose Triangle,” an optical illusion that Penrose devised at the age of 23 that was inspired by the work of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Esher.
After seeing an exhibition of Esher’s work in Amsterdam, Penrose headed back to England with a catalogue of the artist’s works that he shared with his father. Together the two Penroses explored the paradoxical geometries embedded in Escher’s world, creating their own drawings of impossible scenes and objects.
At the same time, Penrose was being steered toward physics by his mentor, Dennis Sciama, a Cambridge professor that he first met while visiting his older bother who was studying there.
Sciama recognized the younger Penrose’s abilities and correctly guessed that his visual way of thinking about mathematical problems would be well suited to some of the most challenging questions of the time, including how to apply Einstein’s highly geometrical theory of gravity, known as general relativity, to the universe at large.
Soon Penrose was working among the leading lights of late-20th-century physics and cosmology, who parade through the book in a series of lively encounters. American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman shows up to grill Penrose on his approach to complex mathematical entities called spinors. Penrose obliges, and is electrified by the encounter.
John Wheeler, best know to non-physicists for popularizing the term “black hole,” is another enthusiastic supporter. And in a parking-lot conversation, Winnipeg-born cosmologist Jim Peebles reassures Penrose over his resistance to string theory as a way of reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics.
“You resist because the universe isn’t like that,” Peebles tells him.
Roger Penrose in Oxford, England, on Oct. 6, 2020.Frank Augstein/The Canadian Press
Along the way, Penrose comes up with the mathematical tool kit to prove that black holes – objects with gravitation fields so strong that not even light can escape them – are a natural consequence of general relativity, something that Einstein himself did not believe.
Furthermore, every black hole must hide a singularity, a point of infinite density where relativity breaks down, pointing to the need for a deeper, as-yet-undiscovered mathematical description of reality. The work was fundamental to new ideas emerging about the cosmos and would later be referenced in Penrose’s 2020 Nobel Prize citation.
It is at this point in the story that a young and still able-bodied Stephen Hawking stepped in to refine and extend Penrose’s ideas. In Hawking, Penrose comes closest to finding his intellectual equal, a fellow traveller who brings total fluency to the new mathematical language Penrose has built, along with an urgent and competitive edge.
The result was both dizzying and transformative. As Barss notes, the collaboration between Hawking and Penrose stimulated new questions about the laws of physics and the constants of nature – numbers such as the speed of light and the strength of the gravitational force, which are apparently arbitrary yet seem extraordinarily well-suited for bringing about the emergence of life. Could those laws and constants be different in other regions of space?
Meanwhile, the tension in Penrose’s life was less creative and more damaging. Penrose’s first marriage to Joan Wedge, with whom he had three sons, ran aground in the 1970s. It is during this turbulent period that Barss offers new insights into the role of Judith Daniels, a family friend who would become Penrose’s mathematical muse and the object of his unrequited affections.
Daniels influence and Penrose’s yearning for her looms large as his marriage collapses while his work on nonrepeating tile patterns – now so central to his legacy – reaches its apex. This chapter is brought to life with excepts from letters that Penrose wrote to Daniels, and which surfaced late in the process of writing the book. Readers will find themselves looking over Barss shoulder as he becomes the one to open the bundle and read out aloud to Penrose his own words from decades before.
The sense of loss over Daniels pervades the events leading up to Penrose’s second marriage to Vanessa Thomas, the mother of his fourth son. By then Penrose was in his late 50s and Thomas was a graduate student more than 30 years his junior. The union offered support and stability, but at the cost of Thomas’s own career. And it allowed Penrose to pursue intellectual forays that increasingly faced pushback from peers even as they gained public attention.
This became evident after the 1989 publication of The Emperor’s New Mind, in which Penrose argues that the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by the ordinary rules of classical physics. Cognitive scientists greeted the intrusion into their field with skepticism and bemusement.
Penrose also gained few adherents with conformal cyclic cosmology, a theoretical model he developed in which the universe is repeatedly reborn in an infinite loop. The theory is laid out in the 2010 book Cycles of Time but its premise and predictions stand in opposition to prevailing views on the Big Bang.
The Penrose triangle is an optical illusion that depicts an object that cannot exist in a three-dimensional space.Wikimedia Commons/Supplied
As Barss writes of Penrose in his later years, “He was no longer a renowned physicists stepping out of line to present daring alternative theories. He was a known maverick who had departed long ago from the mainstream.”
Still, many found Penrose’s geometry-inspired insights too compelling to dismiss out of hand. For non-physicists they could be entrancing. During one public talk in Waterloo, Ont., I watched Penrose launch into a fascinating digression that began with his observation that the entire universe can be described by just a small subset of all the mathematics ever discovered by humans.
Yet mathematics itself is just a small subset of everything the human mind can think about and, in turn, it requires only a small subset of everything that is in the universe to make a human mind. It is a delightful loop, like a philosophical version of the Penrose triangle. But is it merely that – a kind of mental illusion? Or is it saying something more profound?
By the end of the book, one is left to reflect on the circumstances that helped to form such a singular imagination. It’s an open question whether such a career could be repeated now. Penrose came to prominence first as a theorist and then as an intellectual, largely through the written word and public speaking.
In today’s online media environment, where science – like everything else – is communicated through social media posts and viral video clips, it’s harder to imagine the next Penrose.
Barss is not so sure. After six years, he is not ready to say the world is done with scientific pioneers who can also ignite and engage in broader public discussions.
“It feels to me like there’s always going to be an appetite for people who think about biggest possible questions,” he said. “I can’t say whether there is, but I hope that there is.”
