The Impossible Man
Patchen Barss (UK, 14 November); Basic Books (US, 12 November))
Many people still believe (and many scientists tell themselves) that genius is a solitary affair, that what they do is so important it merits exemption from everyday life and the obligations of intimate relationships.
As his subtitle suggests, Patchen Barss doesn’t endorse this notion in The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the cost of genius, as he charts the life of one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. The biography spans Penrose’s childhood in 1930s England to his 2020 Nobel prize win and beyond, tracking his professional collaborations and the collateral damage suffered by family and friends.
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The first thing that caught me off guard is just how many famous connections Penrose has. His mother’s family knew Nobel prize-winning neurologist Ivan Pavlov and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. His father, Lionel, briefly studied psychology with the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and filled the Penrose home with computing pioneers from Bletchley Park. Lionel’s brother, Roland, was a surrealist artist who palled around with Pablo Picasso.
Once you get to his professional associations with the great minds of 20th-century physics and mathematics (a stellar list of people who reframed how we think about the universe on every scale), it starts to feel a tad Forrest Gumpian. These connections must have influenced his genius.
One of my favourite such connections is described in the book: Penrose’s relationship with the artist M. C. Escher. As a child, I would spend hours getting lost in Escher’s world-bending illustrations of fish that turn seamlessly into birds and of endless, impossible staircases. Decades later, when I came across Penrose’s work on infinite tiling, I was drawn back to Escher. I only learned later that these two giants were friends and collaborators.
Holding complex shapes in his mind gave him insight into the singularities at the heart of black holes
Barss reveals how it started. Penrose was attending a lecture on mathematics that he found impenetrable (I can relate) and took a stroll to a nearby museum, where he became mesmerised by Escher’s art. This inspired him to create what I declare to be the best shape: the Penrose triangle, three bars that overlap at the corners in impossible ways.
The ability to hold complex shapes in his mind gave him insight into the singularities at the heart of black holes, which, in turn, helped him refine Albert Einstein’s theories and inspire Stephen Hawking’s work.
Those are just a few of his hits. I read on, making a list in the back of the book until I ran out of room. He inspired the ideas that solidified into the big bang, though he contends that the universe expands and contracts infinitely and has no one start. He also created twistor theory, a way to marry quantum mechanics and general relativity – arguably one of physics’ biggest problems.
This could all have been tiresome to read, but Barss mostly doesn’t let the maths get in the way. There were only one or two points where my eyes glazed over.
Barss spent five years talking to Penrose nearly every week, about his professional and private life, and was given access to personal letters, excerpts of which reveal a man obsessed with the nature of reality to the detriment of family life. The book takes an unflinching look at Penrose’s limited approach to women, whom he seems mostly to regard as muses to inspire his creativity, and at how he isolated himself, especially in later years.
Barss never lets him off the hook for the emotional affair he carried out through much of his marriage or for his broken relationship with his children.
I sometimes found the Penrose of the book aloof to the point of extremity. For example, he was in Dallas in 1963 on the fateful day President John F. Kennedy came to town in a motorcade. I never knew this, but one of the reasons for the visit was to meet Penrose and his colleagues at an event about the future of science in the US.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Penrose took a trip to the beach with friends, but rather than grieve with them, he retreated into his work. It was on the drive home that he dreamed up twistor theory.
He is certainly a genius when it comes to the biggest questions we have: where do space and time come from, how did the universe begin and what will happen at the end of it all? You can’t really argue otherwise. But perhaps there are other kinds of genius, ones we celebrate far less often, to do with how we show love and find connection. And Barss’s unvarnished look at Penrose’s life makes clear that he is unlikely to win prizes in those categories.
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