
The Impossible Man
Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Beville
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By:
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Patchen Barss
About this listen
The first biography—“a stunning achievement” (Kai Bird, American Prometheus)—of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose.
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists.
Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him.
Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.
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Math has a reputation for being inaccessible. People think that it requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet, the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from Rene Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case.
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Great General Creativity Guide (w' math as a lens)
- By V. Bandy on 07-19-24
By: David Bessis, and others
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Significant Figures
- The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians
- By: Ian Stewart
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart introduces the visionaries of mathematics throughout history. Delving into the lives of twenty-five great mathematicians, Stewart examines the roles they played in creating, inventing, and discovering the mathematics we use today. Through these short biographies, we get acquainted with the history of mathematics.
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Beware
- By Anton Kurtz on 12-08-18
By: Ian Stewart
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When Einstein Walked with Gödel
- Excursions to the Edge of Thought
- By: Jim Holt
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.
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A good overview of scientific theory
- By MJ Walters on 09-11-18
By: Jim Holt
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The Maniac
- By: Benjamin Labatut
- Narrated by: Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
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Gergo Danka and Eva Magyar are excellent narrators
- By Barbara S on 11-04-23
By: Benjamin Labatut
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Why Machines Learn
- The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI
- By: Anil Ananthaswamy
- Narrated by: Rene Ruiz
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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We are living through a revolution in machine learning-powered AI that shows no signs of slowing down. This technology is based on relatively simple mathematical ideas, some of which go back centuries, including linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mathematics. It took the birth and advancement of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental math behind machine learning.
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A great listen, but a physical book is pre appropriate
- By Sameer D. on 11-07-24
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Robert Oppenheimer
- A Life Inside the Center
- By: Ray Monk
- Narrated by: Michael Goldstrom
- Length: 35 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough that was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and that made Oppenheimer the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” But with his actions leading up to that great achievement, he also set himself on a dangerous collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunters. In Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, Ray Monk, author of peerless biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, goes deeper than any previous biographer in the quest to solve the enigma of Oppenheimer’s motivations and his complex personality.
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A comprehensive biography
- By Jean on 10-17-14
By: Ray Monk
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The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved
- How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry
- By: Mario Livio
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until they encountered the quintic equation, which resisted solution for three centuries. Working independently, two prodigies ultimately proved that the quintic cannot be solved by a simple formula. The first popular account of the mathematics of symmetry and order, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved is told not through abstract formulas but in a beautifully written and dramatic account of the lives and work of some of the greatest and most intriguing mathematicians in history.
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Historical Perspective Appreciated
- By Michael Hanrahan on 01-22-20
By: Mario Livio
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Meet the Neighbors
- Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World
- By: Brandon Keim
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this wide-ranging exploration of animals' inner lives, Keim takes us into courtrooms and wildlife hospitals, under backyard decks and into deserts, to meet anew the wild creatures who populate our communities and the philosophers, rogue pest controllers, ecologists, wildlife doctors, and others who are reimagining our relationships to them.
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Meet Your Neighbors
- By Amazon Customer on 04-03-25
By: Brandon Keim
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Life as No One Knows It
- The Physics of Life's Emergence
- By: Sara Imari Walker
- Narrated by: Sara Imari Walker
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like. In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is.
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Fascinating thought patterns
- By John linden on 09-10-24
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Alien Earths
- The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
- By: Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone.
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I really enjoyed her perspective on the subject
- By Vladimir Randy Jeune on 11-02-24
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Everything Is Predictable
- How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
- By: Tom Chivers
- Narrated by: Tom Chivers
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything. But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem?
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I was looking forward to this. What a disappointment.
- By Alessandro Fadini on 06-28-24
By: Tom Chivers
Extraordinary portrait of a flawed genius
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beautiful language
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Penrose’s books are really pretty understandable (but do have quite a few equations, thus are not very popular). I would recommend reading the Penrose Wikipedia page for a more interesting read.
Some reviewers feel the author relied way too much on the 80 year old Penrose’s failing memories and viewpoints and did not capture the Penrose in his prime. I suspect there is some truth to this.
The narration was excellent.
Flawed
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Too much focus on his love life
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