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The Needy Genius Who Understood the Cosmos (People, Not So Much)
“The Impossible Man,” by Patchen Barss, depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexity.
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THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, by Patchen Barss
The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.
But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”
After the case was settled out of court, “Penrose tiles never again surprised anyone entering the loo,” writes Patchen Barss in “The Impossible Man,” his new biography of Sir Roger. Barss spent lots of in-person time with Penrose, 93, and spoke to him by video chat or phone almost every week for five years. While the toilet paper episode had a happy ending, many of the others in this book do not. “He was consistently willing to respond to my questions,” writes Barss in an author’s note, “even when the answers were difficult or painful.”
The result is a moving and intimate portrait of a figure who has expanded our understanding of the universe — and offered a controversial alternative to the Big Bang theory about its origins — yet has struggled to connect with his fellow human beings. Barss embeds the work in the life, taking any chance he can get to link abstract theoretical concepts with things we can see and touch in the visible world. On the very first page he offers a cozy scene of Penrose adding a splash of milk to his cup of coffee, “the cold globules of lactose, protein and fat” eventually dissipating into the hotter liquid — a vivid image for how “the universe moves relentlessly toward greater entropy” until “even the last surviving black holes will ultimately boil away into an oblivion of scattered radiation.”
Much of the writing in “The Impossible Man” is similarly evocative. Barss, a science journalist based in Toronto, is ever attuned to how sentences and storytelling, like mathematical equations and Penrose’s own line drawings, can bring us closer to the “world-behind-the-world.” Penrose himself has long been known for his visual sensibility. He recalls an early introduction to the powers of geometry when, as a picky 6-year-old, he pushed a blob of stewed greens on his lunch plate into a semicircle — thereby tricking his nanny into believing he had eaten half his spinach and freeing him to go play outside.
Geometry also offered the young Penrose a way to connect with his emotionally remote father, Lionel. He reminisces about Lionel marveling at the shadows on a sundial, and though Roger did not yet have the language “to describe a two-dimensional shadow marching across a three-dimensional structure marking movement through four-dimensional space-time,” he remembers his father’s palpable joy. “He was glimpsing something so amazing, even Lionel was moved by it.”
Words like “joy” and “beauty” and “beautiful” come up repeatedly in “The Impossible Man”; Barss elegantly conveys the thrill of discovery, which for the intuitive Penrose tended to arrive not by grinding through equations but in the form of a sudden epiphany. His Nobel Prize-winning work on singularities and black holes was years in the making, but his breakthrough insight finally came to him while crossing a London street.
Thinking about intergalactic mysteries in four dimensions was one thing; being a spouse and a parent was another. Barss provides an unsparing picture of Penrose’s troubled home life. His first wife, Joan, followed him to various academic postings around the world and raised their three boys. He seemed baffled by her depression and would retreat to his basement office, which he entered through a trap door he had carved out of their living-room floor. The sons describe him as a remote father who was “physically aggressive” toward Joan. When Barss asked him about the violence, Roger depicted his long-suffering wife as somebody who forced his hand. “There may have been occasions when there was no other choice,” he said. “It was like a spider’s web.”
Barss shows Penrose burdening the women in his life with enormous emotional demands and expectations while doing little to reciprocate. During much of his marriage to Joan, he also pursued a younger woman he considered his muse, even though she did not share his intense feelings. His second wife, Vanessa, was his former doctoral student and 34 years his junior; she recalls him becoming ever more obsessed with his contentious ideas about consciousness and quantum collapse, affiliating himself with almost anyone who would listen. Vanessa drew the line at his appearance in 2018 on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which “challenged her basic belief that she and Roger still had any shared values.” They separated after more than 30 years together.
“Space-time is out there,” a young Penrose told one of his teachers. “And I am exploring it with my life.” Barss sees the beauty in this notion while also registering Penrose’s habit of invoking the universe to escape accountability. This biography depicts Sir Roger in multiple dimensions; only a writer as psychologically astute as Barss could show us an impossible man in full.
THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius | By Patchen Barss | Basic Books | 337 pp. | $32
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai
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