That Roger Penrose biography

 

Amazon link

I have just read this biography of Roger Penrose ("The Impossible Man" by Patchen Barss) and I am conflicted. The author has spent years researching the book, visiting key locations, interviewing most of the people who were central to Penrose's life and spending a large amount of time befriending Roger Penrose himself. 

There is a great deal of personal detail about the minutiae of Penrose's life and relationships: with parents, siblings, friends and ex-partners.

In the old days this could have been an interesting and insightful picture of an intriguing man and his truly transformational ideas in mathematics and physics. Yet, we no longer live in those days: to get published today one has to adopt a moralising, self-righteous and judgemental tone. 

Victims must be found and Roger Penrose must be found to be at fault.

It's not quite a hit-job, but it's in that paradigm. The author's hard work has given us a voyeuristic picture to be sure but it's not super-surprising: most lives are like that in kind if not degree. 

Such prurience might be forgiven if it led to deeper understanding but it does not. The author seems to think it's Penrose's fault that he turned out - in terms of emotional distance and intense intellectual focus - much like his father, but that doesn't surprise the majority of humanity who have heard the saying that 'the apple does not fall far from the tree'.

Peter Woit has a similar distaste for the patronising tone of this biography and its lack of interest in Penrose's specific accomplishments - although saying that Penrose's manner of relationships was typical of upper-class Englishmen of his generation (born in the 1930s) understates just how specifically detached from intimate emotional competence Roger Penrose actually was and is.

The comments on Woit's blog are interesting too. Someone said that Penrose's naivety led to him being taken advantage of by the author who kind of set him up - and that too sounds plausible.

There is room for a better book which does what Penrose himself failed to do in several of his own publications: explain what is unique and valuable in Roger Penrose's work in terms ordinary mortals can sort of understand.

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Trivia note: I spoke once to Professor Penrose on the telephone in the 1980s, when I led a team at the STL research lab in artificial intelligence: we were considering hiring from his post-doc team. Penrose was helpful but reserved, as I recall, as if talking to business people about non-science topics only necessitated the loan of a few neurons for the duration of the call...