The Impossible Man

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
Patchen Barss
Basic Books (November 12, 2024), 298 pages
Kindle edition $19.99, Amazon hardcover $29.95

I have long been familiar with the work of Roger Penrose, so when this book was published I was keen on getting it. Patchen Barss provides a comprehensive recounting of Penrose’s life and work.

Penrose was the child of distant parents. They wanted him to go into medicine, but he had a proclivity for math. They asked a family friend to evaluate his math skills, and his response was so unqualified that they relented. He eventually received his PhD and got a teaching job.

At Cambridge Penrose worked with the scientist Dennis Sciama. Dennis introduced Roger to an American named Joan, who was helping with illustrations for a book he was working on. They fell for each other and were eventually married. But meanwhile Roger still had a longtime friend named Judith, who was steeped in the humanities.

Much of the book centers around these three people. Roger wanted input from Judith on his work, but Judith was reluctant to offer feedback on material with which she was not familiar. Penrose wanted to have an affair, but Judith felt it was inappropriate. Roger and Joan had a rocky marriage, even though they had three sons. He neglected his responsibilities as a husband and father and buried himself in his work. Penrose and Joan eventually divorced, he and Judith parted ways, and later in life he married a much younger research assistant. That marriage failed as well. He was pretty much a jerk in his personal life.

One of the more interesting parts of the book was Roger’s collaboration with Stephen Hawking, whom he first met when Hawking could still speak and write without assistance. They collaborated on the developing theory of black holes, while their perspectives differed. Both began writing books that popularized physics and astronomy, and Penrose was miffed that Hawking got more attention for his popular work than Roger did for his.

Author Patchen Barss has a personal relationship with Penrose (still very much alive), and the footnotes show much of the material comes from a series of personal interviews. Barss is to be credited with his objective look at Penrose, and his unwillingness to cut him any slack for his boorish personal behavior. The same holds true for his account of Penrose being unwilling to listen to criticism of some of his more outrageous theories later in life.

Barss offers an even-handed and comprehensive look at the life and work of Roger Penrose.

Deep Water: The World in the Ocean

Deep Water: The World in the Ocean
James Bradley
HarperOne (July 2, 2024), 467 pages
Kindle edition $10.99, Amazon paperback $15.19

This was not the book I expected. Its content covers more than the title suggests.

Author James Bradley begins the book with a discussion of the creation of the earth. He then discusses human evolution. He makes the interesting point that among mammals, only humans do not have the innate ability to swim. That’s something we have to learn. He goes off on a long tangent on swimming, not all ocean related. He then offers an interesting chapter on migration, though he includes birds as well as sea creatures. He goes on to discuss sound, both the sounds that whales and other inhabitants of the sea make, and the dangers that human-introduced sound bring to undersea denizens.

Bradley discusses cognition in fish. They seem to be more intelligent than we realize. He offers an interesting discussion about cooperation among fish. The author writes about the cleaner wrasse, several species of fish that set up a business of removing parasites and other foreign objects from the scales of larger fish. In the same chapter, he discusses the concept of self-awareness, and the experiments performed to see if fish have self-awareness.

The author then writes about the nature of the tides and then segues into a discussion of rising sea levels and the threat it has on people in low-lying islands. He recounts the Five Deeps mission, a venture by the egotistical billionaire Victor Vescovo and his desire to visit the deepest parts of five oceans. Bradley talks with the mission scientist Alan Jamieson who was there for the science, not the ego. (Susan Casey writes about her own experience with this project in The Underworld.)

Bradley devotes considerable space to threats to the ocean and the planet. He writes about the threat of undersea mining, but then goes off on a tangent about cobalt mining on dry land and how our desire for cool electronics depends on child labor in the cobalt mines in the Congo (not about the ocean, but worth our attention). Bradley goes on a visit with a scientist to see firsthand the damage plastics are doing to the oceans and our environment.

We also learn about the history of cargo ships, the damage that container shipping does to the ocean, and the quest for more energy-efficient vessels.

There is a lot of good material in Deep Water, but I have a couple of complaints. All the measurements are in the metric system. It would be nice to have had those translated into the English system for the American edition. And then Bradley is Australian, and he refers to Australian politics, assuming the reader understands the reference, which was not the case for this American reader.

If the subject interests you, Deep Water is worth reading. But don’t expect to be inspired and uplifted.