A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

The Road to Reality

'A truly remarkable book...this is just the sort of book that could inspire mathematical awakenings' - Sunday Times

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists. Genuinely magnificent and stimulating

Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow

This is a tour de force that is unlikely to be bettered this decade

Roger Penrose is one the world's foremost theoretical physicists, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. He has won numerous other prizes, including the Albert Einstein Medal, for his fundamental contributions to general relativity and cosmology. 
 
He is the bestselling author of The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. His other books include Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, The Emperor's New Mind, Shadows of the Mind and, with Stephen Hawking, The Nature of Space and Time. He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, and lives in Oxford.

**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** 
 
 The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book. 
 
 Roger Penrose's purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. 
 
 The Road to Reality is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. In a single work of colossal scope one of the world's greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe that we all inhabit. 
 
'Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He is one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius' Lee Smolin

A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness

Shadows Of The Mind

By the author of The Emperor's New Mind 
 
'One of the most important works of the second half of the twentieth-century' The Times

Penrose has come closer than anyone to a rigorous discussion of the most intriguing problems of all: what are we? How do we think? And what is it that makes us human?

Clearly the product of a brilliant mind

His book may be the first accessible report to a general readership about the site, if not the actual substance, of the holy grail of consciousness - the precise point where quantum activity interacts with classical physical activity in the brain... His passionate attempt at popular exposition lends importance to a debate that he believes too crucial to be left to the specialists alone

‘One of the most important works…of the twentieth century’ The Times 
 
Shadows of the Mind is a profound exploration of what modern physics has to tell us about the human mind. 
 
A visionary description of what a new physics - one that is adequate to account for our extraordinary brain - might look like. It is also a bold speculation on the biological process that makes consciousness what it is. 
 
 
In this illuminating book Penrose provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation – something that can’t be explained by present-day science.

Eschermatics

Roger Penrose is one the world's foremost theoretical physicists, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. He has won numerous other prizes, including the Albert Einstein Medal, for his fundamental contributions to general relativity and cosmology. 
 
He is the bestselling author of The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. His other books include Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, The Emperor's New Mind, Shadows of the Mind and, with Stephen Hawking, The Nature of Space and Time. He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, and lives in Oxford.

Roger Penrose

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists

A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status

Cycles of Time can be highly recommended as an example of how cosmologists are now thinking the unthinkable by trying to look back beyond the Big Bang and forward beyond the death of our universe

Cycles of Time is as uncondescending in style and as impenetrable in content as his previous books. Which is not to say that there are not, as before, many pleasures to be had along the way

Doing what most find impossible has long been Penrose's stock-in-trade in mathematics and physics... Destined to be another bestseller

An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** 
 
 What came before the Big Bang? 
 
 How did the universe begin and must it inevitably end? 
 
 In this remarkable book Roger Penrose brilliantly illuminates some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. 
 
 Cycles of Time contains a penetrating analysis of the second law of thermodynamics - according to which the 'randomness' of our world is continually increasing - and a thorough examination of the light-cone geometry of space-time. It combines these two central themes to show how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the 'big bang' of a new one. 
 
 Presenting various standard and non-standard cosmological models, discussing black holes in depth as well as taking in the role of the cosmic microwave background along the way, Roger Penrose argues that the Big Bang was not actually the beginning of everything - nor will it signal the end. 
 
 'Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow' Independent

Roger Penrose

Praise for Cycles of Time

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists

Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow

A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists

Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow

A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status

Penrose is truly one of the world's leading mathematical physicists

Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow

A genuinely new idea about the origins of the universe that, although untested, seems to hold together theoretically and must be taken seriously given Penrose's status

Books by Roger Penrose

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