I happened to pass by Waterstones on Friday and couldn’t help but notice a display of copies of the new Roger Penrose book, The Road to Reality. This enormous book is 1000 pages long and copiously illustrated.
So I picked it up and flicked through it. Let’s just first reiterate that even picking it up is not something to do half-heartedly. Then you look at it, and are immediately taken back to college, as the whole thing feels like some kind of set text. But I was in a Waterstones on Oxford Street – not a shop that ordinarily does an enormous trade in set texts (that’d be the Gower Street branch of what was once Dillons).
I went away thinking “Woah! I must find out more about it.” The Amazon blurb from the publisher says that it’s a book for everybody, although I couldn’t help but notice quite a lot of maths included. The only review that I’ve seen of the book so far is this one in Scotland on Sunday (official publication is still a few days off). It explains that the first few hundred pages are indeed all maths and physics that enable the reader to get up to speed for the latter part of the book.
I must admit that I’m quite keen to have a read, but at a cost of £30 and the detail it’s presented in, aside from actual students, I’d have thought that the audience for this book is going to be quite limited.