The Impossible Man is Patchen Barss’s biography of an artist, Roger Penrose, who works in the unforgiving medium of mathematical physics—a psychological portrait in novelistic detail, whose theme is in its subtitle, the cost of genius. Call it a meditation on “The Choice,” a poem of Yeats that begins

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Barss will demur from that, though he begins and ends his book with descriptions of Penrose, now age 93, alone and still relentlessly at work despite his near blindness. Awarded every honor a scientist might hope for (including a Nobel Prize and a knighthood), he lives a life of routine in voluntary isolation, unwilling to divert time from work even to reconcile with his sons. Characteristically, Penrose is exploring idiosyncratic ideas in pursuit of big questions: the ultimate fate of the universe; the physical basis of consciousness; unification of the two foundational theories of physics, quantum mechanics (the dazzlingly precise but often baffling account of matter and energy at the smallest of scales) and general relativity (Einstein’s beautiful geometric theory of gravity that grounds modern cosmology’s account of the material universe and its evolution). Characteristically, he sees the questions as linked.

Penrose started early. At age seven, he was enchanted when his father, Lionel, demonstrated and explained the working of a sundial—how its only moving part, a shadow driven by a cosmic engine, can measure something as ethereal as time. Lionel, says Barss, was a highly intelligent, intimidating, emotionally stunted man, “serious, curious, and humorless,” who “studied rather than enjoyed” the world. Roger was not only pleas-ed but surprised that teaching this lesson had made his father smile. The only joy Lionel seemed able to share with his children came from solving intellectual puzzles. Intellect was the key to his approval and to Roger’s sense of self-worth.

The youthful Roger devoured popular books on science, telling a teacher, “Space-time is out there. And I am exploring it with my life.” He studied mathematics at University College despite his father’s belief that it was suitable only for people with no other skills. (The academic enlisted in hopes of proving Roger untalented was so impressed that Lionel had to give in.) He came to believe that mathematics—with its clarity, beauty, and power—couldn’t be a merely human invention but must be in some sense part of reality, that the world was at some deep level made of geometry. For a socially insecure young man—he created three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles and brought them to parties as icebreakers—that reality was a refuge. Penrose later reflected that he’d probably missed out on something by making math a substitute for girls, but that the loss wouldn’t bother him if he could “maintain the impression that [his] work is really worthwhile,” a revealingly in-secure formulation.

His graduate studies in Cambridge produced a Ph.D. thesis in pure mathematics that its examiners called “original,” “ambitious,” “masterly,” and good enough to earn the degree “many times over.” But the direction of his life was changed dramatically by lectures on physics, and he eventually became a Cambridge postdoc with Dennis Sciama, one of the founders of modern cosmology. There Penrose met Joan Wedge, the first woman of his own age that he really got to know. (He was always comfortable with his much younger sister Shirley and her friends—with one of whom, Judith Daniels, he would later become involved.)

Roger and Joan married in 1958, something he later explained, says Barss, in contradictory ways: Joan talked him into it (later updating “talked” to “tricked”); he needed to stand up for himself in the face of his parents’ disapproval; the marriage wasn’t a choice but, as with all of his life, something that just happened to him.

Joan was prone to episodes of depression, which Roger conveniently assumed would somehow sort themselves out. When their daughter was stillborn, Joan became inconsolable, but he could be happy doing physics. Over the next decade he decided the marriage was a mistake, privately hoped that Joan would save him the bother of ending it by leaving him, and began an emotional infidelity with Judith Daniels, who he decided would be his muse. When a therapist gave him permission to end the marriage, he did so by accepting a professorship at Oxford and moving there without telling Joan and their sons that he was leaving them.

This was the template for Roger’s relationships with women: difficulties met with denial and indecision, followed by withdrawal into mathematics—literally so, in a house he and Joan shared. Beneath it was a garage they didn’t need, so Roger turned the garage into an office and installed in the living room a trap door that he could pull shut behind him as he disappeared into his work. Other muses followed, or were offered the job, including Vanessa Thomas, a mathematics Ph.D. student whom he married in 1988, when she was 23 and he 57. They have since parted but have never divorced.

_____________

Joyful pursuit of science is interleaved with repetitions of this sad theme, described at a length that I found wearying. What these repetitions can teach about the connections between Penrose’s life and work the reader could have learned from an account of one or two episodes. The depth and difficulty of that work pose a formidable challenge to any biographer. Penrose’s “popular” account of his theories about consciousness, The Emperor’s New Mind, runs 450 densely printed pages and devotes the first 373 to the mathematical and scientific preliminaries he thought necessary.

One connection between the man and the work is revealed in Barss’s account of the delight Penrose took in geometry. He thought in pictures and was fascinated by the woodcuts and lithographs of M.C. Escher. From purely aesthetic interest he discovered surprising ways to cover a floor with tiles (creating patterns that anticipated the structure of strange, subsequently discovered substances called quasicrystals). He reformulated Einstein’s relativity equations to make them symmetrical.

Barss also offers connections that are more figurative and literary. A nice example prefaces the work for which Penrose won the Nobel Prize. A black hole is a region dominated by gravitational forces that prevent any matter or energy from escaping. Solving Einstein’s equations in idealized cases implied that a black hole would develop a “singularity” into which all matter and energy within it would be forced while subjected to gravitational forces that became infinite (and infinitely destructive). Much effort was devoted to showing that singularities couldn’t actually arise but existed only in spurious solutions that resulted from unrealistic idealizations.

The very existence of black holes was still in doubt when the discovery of quasars pushed theoretical questions about them toward the mainstream. Quasars release immense bursts of radiation, trillions of times more energetic than our sun. Might a quasar be powered by energy released as enormous quantities of matter were sucked into a black hole? Penrose became interested in the paradoxical problem of understanding events inside a black hole, which were unobservable from the outside and could convey to an outsider no information. Conventional techniques of analysis, Penrose thought, were hopeless. A new insight—into the unseeable—was required.

It occurred to him one day as he crossed a street in Oxford, resulting in a three-page paper introducing geometrical techniques (from topology) that revolutionized the field: If general relativity is correct, every black hole must contain a singularity. Barss presents that moment of inspiration as the climax of a story about a burst of radiation that began its travels two and a half billion years before Penrose stepped off the curb. He provides a lyrical timeline of the journey: begun when single-celled organisms were relatively new on Earth; having 540 million years to go when the Cambrian evolutionary explosion began; still 300,000 years away when Homo sapiens emerged; arriving here shortly after the invention of instruments that made its detection possible and Penrose became available to think hard about its ultimate source.

Some of Barss’s lyrical effusions may leave readers none the wiser. And the author misses opportunities, allowing mystery to tip over into mystification. For example, Penrose’s enchantment with the rich and surprising mathematics of complex numbers isn’t illuminated by accepting the unfortunate 17th-century terminology that distinguished “real” from “imaginary” numbers as distinguishing the reality-based from the incomprehensibly fantastic.

Penrose’s genius trapped him in isolation, alienated from family and colleagues. What it cost others, Barss says, was the “trail of heartbreak and anger [left] in his wake.” Barss does not suggest that the cost was a just payment, and he is unwilling to assume that it was required for that genius to flourish.

Has Penrose succeeded on his own terms? How good is the work? Barss quotes one collaborator who, echoing the thoughts of others, contrasted being “a human genius,” one of which he named, with being Penrose, whose insights “seem to stem from some superhuman life form.”

Photo: George Bergman / Wikimedia

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