Impossible Man

I received this biography of a living person as an Advanced Reader's Copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

The author is a science communicator working primarily in television, but with some non-fiction books to his credit. He reports spending six years working on this biography based on his interviews with the subject and written and verbal communications from those who knew in the course of his life. It is interesting to see how Roger Penrose was raised by parents who had unusual emotional relations which happened to coincide with a kind of mental gift at an early age. He came across his love of geometry and a talent for visualization that stayed with him as his greatest strength over his career. There were also rivalries among his siblings and schoolmates that spurred him to apply himself to abstract thought in ways he might not have pursued all on his own. When his father happened to take an interest in his son's passion for geometry it left an impression on the boy. He learned about physics through popularizations but only came to follow it instead of medicine in an almost offhand way because of rules at the schools he attended.

The middle of this book covers Penrose's rise in theroretical interest using his geometrical insights which were unconventional among his peers. He also married an American he met, Joan, despite their deep differences in personality and career interest. When she experienced a series of depressions he was personally unequipped to help, immersed in his own life of the mind. At one point he remembered with a friend of his younger sister's, Judith, and transferred his emotional investment to her as a muse. Though the relationship was not primarily sexual as he thought of it, the secrecy and obsessive aspects led him away from this marriage with three young children when he left to take a job at Oxford and live on his own. This enabled him to spend time with Judith who helped him put together his books. He would repeat this pattern three more times after the two of them broke off their relationship, each time with much younger unattached women. One of them termed this a "Gaugin complex" in which a talented creative man feels he can only produce his work only through the companionship of a young woman. He married one of these companions for three decades, but tried to return to it afterwards. I was troubled by the psychology that led to this, which never seems to have been resolved or completely understood by Penrose. In the end, he also alienated many professional physicists by devising interpretations of physics that went far beyond the mainstream. He was the only one on his level talking about cyclic cosmology and how microtubules underlie consciousness. This pattern towards conflict was as though he could not control what the emotional poverty of his upbringing caused him to do. By the end of the book we see Penrose as a solitary, infirm man in his 90s clinging to a hope that some of these later preoccupations would outlive him. It is an odd trajectory for a life that seemed as though it had been destined to achieve so much distinction in mathematical physics, with numerous medals besides the Nobel Prize, but went down a fringe path no one else wanted to follow. This is what makes his story one of the "impossible" man of the title.