The Road to Reality
> It functions, sadly, as a sort of trap for impressionable bright people very eager for advanced knowledge Or perhaps people who assume that it's a good all-in-one solution to get a glimpse of understanding the Universe. For me personally, I have no wish to be mathematically fluent now. I admit that I can't imagine committing wholly to the studies of maths and physics for more than two years - this book seemed like a Magic Bullet. My plan is to read it very slowly, perhaps over a decade. My mind is on other projects for now, but if I have this quietly stewing at the back of my mind, maybe…
Try Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality." He takes the approach of assuming that his readers can range from absolute beginners to mathematicians, and that if you prefer, you can skip the equations and the exercises. But if you attempt to understand them, then your picture of the Universe will become richer that no other pop science book can promise. It's an enticing thought, and that and his gentle prose are just about his only tricks to push his readers through his enormous tome. I haven't finished it yet but it does feel rewarding that much of the maths that I've come across (Alevels…
I think the only way to consistently memorize an equation is to deeply understand it. Not just how to apply it, but essentially how to derive it. What motivates it. Why it must take the form that it does. With fundamental physical equations you have to be a little hand-wavy, because they are, well, fundamental, so they can't be derived from anything else. But you can motivate the form of the Schrodinger equation from the classical wave equation. (I should note that Feynman disagrees with this claim, but you can find a nice motivation for the form in Penrose's Road to Reality.)…
As a Mathematician who worked in Theoretical Physics for a bit, I'm happy to hear that there's people out there interested in the area. Maths often get a bad rep, but at their core they are probably the most interesting thing to learn, on par with music in my opinion. I encourage anyone interested in Mathematics (regardless of your level) to check out Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. I know it's technically a physics book, even though Penrose was originally a Mathematician, but trust me, he explains things in a way that open up your mind, even for seasoned veterans. He begins with basic…
The author has a point on the benefit of transference, but he's too extreme in his conclusions. Trigonometry is useful in so many ways. It's even useful for projects around the house, let alone for a lot of careers. Last I checked it comes after 8th grade. On the other end of the spectrum he concedes Harvard philosophy undergrads might want to read "The Road to Reality". Bullshit - No undergrad can understand all the math in this book and no one is proposing that they should. Reductio ad absurdum. And don't forget gaming. Lots of young people these days dream about a career at a game…
In 2004, Roger Penrose published "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" which is 1100 pages long. http://staff.washington.edu/freitz/penrose.pdf "One of my mother’s closest friends, when she was a young girl, was among those who could not grasp fractions. This lady once told me so herself after she had retired from a successful career as a ballet dancer. I was still young, not yet fully launched in my activities as a mathematician, but was recognized as someone who enjoyed working in that subject. ‘It’s all that cancelling’, she said to me, ‘I could just never…
I strongly advise against trying to learn physics from this book. Trust me, while the idea looks magnificent in theory, it's a horrible book to try and learn from for someone who doesn't have the mathematical and physical background. It just isn't possible, and yes, even if you're very, very smart and talented. Despite the fact that theoretically it's self-contained, you really need an equivalent of a PhD in math or mathematical physics to approach this book; but if you do have that background, there are better specialized textbooks. The whole thing is basically a massive exercise in vanity.…
If you're up for a real wild ride and have some time to kill (no, seriously - the thing is over 1000 pages), Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...) actually covers this stuff in a reasonably accessible way. I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I…
The way renormalisation is mostly covered in popular media, made me think you can’t do quantum physics without dirty tricks to get rid of infinites. Then I read The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose and in the chapter on renormalisation it mentions just “by the way“ that the problem goes away if you assume the universe has a minimum scale, or something like that. Why isn’t this common knowledge? Why isn’t this one of the first things that gets told when talking about renormalisation? Why is the default assumption that the universe is continuous? Doesn’t seem like we have a good reason for…
My advice is to not try Penrose's book. The vast majority of its contents will be utterly incomprehensible to someone without a PhD level background in physics. Technically it is self-contained and nothing beyond high school knowledge is needed to understand it; but while technically true, in reality it's a cruel deceit. If you try to learn it without advanced training in physics and math, you'll run into limitations related to mathematical maturity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_maturity) very quickly, within the space of the first few chapters. The idea of this book seems…