Cecil
15th May 2006, 11:45 PM
Has anyone else read this? It's a massive (1100-pages) treatise on the current low-level description of the nature of reality in relation to its mathematical underpinnings. There's a summary on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_reality).
I just picked it up the other day, and am about 100 pages in. It's like no other science book I've read. It seemingly aims to be a popular science book, and the writing style bolsters that view, but it does not shy away from the mathematics. The pages are littered with partial differention operators amidst a sea of Greek. In the introduction, the author (Roger Penrose) made no qualms about the fact that our current understanding of reality IS highly mathematical, and that no description of the universe's workings would be complete without including math.
He has mentioned that he aims to provide a more conceptual understanding of the mathematics, rather than merely slogging through page after page of formulae. I think this is the best way to do it - I had a prof last semester (for Computation Vision) that did the same thing. It was a CS course, not a math course, so despite the material being relatively math-based, his proofs were all very handwaving. I'm of the opinion that the rigorous proving of things should be left to the mathematicians, and that understanding WHY something is the case in general is more beneficial in applying the result.
Most of the math is currently over my head - I know little beyond multi-variable calculus, and the book talks about things like n-dimensional manifolds and tensors. There are many many occurences of people's names used in adjective form. Hopefully I'll be eased into this stuff - the back of the book says it, "assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader." It'll be cool to learn about all this stuff.
I'll let you know how it goes. :)
I just picked it up the other day, and am about 100 pages in. It's like no other science book I've read. It seemingly aims to be a popular science book, and the writing style bolsters that view, but it does not shy away from the mathematics. The pages are littered with partial differention operators amidst a sea of Greek. In the introduction, the author (Roger Penrose) made no qualms about the fact that our current understanding of reality IS highly mathematical, and that no description of the universe's workings would be complete without including math.
He has mentioned that he aims to provide a more conceptual understanding of the mathematics, rather than merely slogging through page after page of formulae. I think this is the best way to do it - I had a prof last semester (for Computation Vision) that did the same thing. It was a CS course, not a math course, so despite the material being relatively math-based, his proofs were all very handwaving. I'm of the opinion that the rigorous proving of things should be left to the mathematicians, and that understanding WHY something is the case in general is more beneficial in applying the result.
Most of the math is currently over my head - I know little beyond multi-variable calculus, and the book talks about things like n-dimensional manifolds and tensors. There are many many occurences of people's names used in adjective form. Hopefully I'll be eased into this stuff - the back of the book says it, "assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader." It'll be cool to learn about all this stuff.
I'll let you know how it goes. :)