The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

Product Information

I’m certainly fond of true statements, In this case we have one of the world’s leading experts on singularity theorems in classical GR making a claim about them in print. I strongly suspect that he knows what he is talking about here and is making true statements, that’s why I reported on them. As for mathematically precise statements, they have their place, but in many contexts they’re either not possible, not appropriate or not worth the investment of time and energy needed to get them. The problem with not fixing the moduli is that then your theory has massless scalar fields that couple to matter, producing long-range forces. We have very strong experimental bounds that these things don’t exist. So such a theory is simply wrong. Penrose is a great and highly original guy, because of his contributions to GR, twistors, his triangle, his tiling, and so forth, but this kind of prayer is really bizarre. I have not seen the book.

The Road to Reality - Penguin Books UK

I really think you could understand everything I say if you actually read complete sentences instead of just look for points for Penrose asks us to consider if the world of mathematics is in any sense real. He claims that objective truths are revealed through mathematics and that it is not a subjective matter of opinion. He uses Fermat's last theorem as a point to consider what it would mean for mathematical statements to be subjective. He shows that "the issue is the objectivity of the Fermat assertion itself, not whether anyone’s particular demonstration of it (or of its negation) might happen to be convincing to the mathematical community of any particular time". Penrose introduces a more complicated mathematical notion, the axiom of choice, which has been debated amongst mathematicians. He notes that "questions as to whether some particular proposal for a mathematical entity is or is not to be regarded as having objective existence can be delicate and sometimes technical". Finally he discusses the Mandelbrot set and claims that it exists in a place outside of time and space and was only uncovered by Mandelbrot. Any mathematical notion can be thought of as existing in that place. Penrose invites the reader to reconsider their notions of reality beyond the matter and stuff that makes up the physical world. I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! …I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. …why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! …” A mathematical proof is essentially an argument in which one starts from a mathematical statement, which is taken to be true, and using only logical rules arrives at a new mathematical statement. If the mathematician hasn't broken any rules then the new statement is called a theorem. The most fundamental mathematical statements, from which all other proofs are built, are called axioms and their validity is taken to be self-evident. Mathematicians trust that the axioms, on which their theorems depend, are actually true. The Greek philosopher Plato (c.429-347 BC) believed that mathematical proofs referred not to actual physical objects but to certain idealized entities. Physical manifestations of geometric objects could come close to the Platonic world of mathematical forms, but they were always approximations. To Plato the idealized mathematical world of forms was a place of absolute truth, but inaccessible from the physical world.Besides, please, have and show (!) some respect for Penrose: He did more in a lifetime than most of us combined and/or put together will ever do! Or are you telling me that if Newton were alive you’d walk all over his ass because he ‘was wrong’?!!! (Sorry, Peter, for the language; it’s just too soon in the morning to read gigantic loads of crap… add that to a bit of Napolitan blood and you have a recipe for a (flame-)war! >;-)

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose | Waterstones

One weird thing is that he *completely* skips over basic calculus – I guess that’s ok though – it leaves more time for fun stuff. The Portal Book Club - We have a weekly group that meets to talk about this book. Come join us in Discord!I’ve been deleting comments that seem to me off topic, repetitive, and purely designed to promote the interests of the writer. This has nothing to do with censorship of unpopular scientific ideas, I’d do the same if someone tries to promote their mainstream work on string theory or anything else here this way. The following might have been missed by the readers due to it having been posted a couple of days ago, but here it is (to humble ST people) Unfortunately, this analysis is effectly at the forfront of modern analysis and to write the sort of papers that is being asked is beyound anyone on the planet at this moment in time.

The Road to Reality Study Notes - The Portal Wiki The Road to Reality Study Notes - The Portal Wiki

I was just reporting what Penrose says, and I’m not interested enough in this issue to spend my time on the details of this. In any case I don’t think Penrose has an air-tight argument against extra dimensions, because you can always claim that quantization solves the problem. This sonuds to me like a strong claim about what a candidate “fundamental theory” (if such a thing exists) *must* be able to explain. (I am not saying that you believe in the existence of such a theory, but rather pointing out what you seem to be demanding from a candidate.) I too would like to read an elaboration of this instability issue. Does he mean N space + 1 time or N space + M time, or both? Does he mean the same thing that originally did in Einstein’s cosmology (thought of as say deSitter space)?Sorry for the shift of topic, but I couldn’t resist mentioning some interesting new and recent papers: Note that Matti Pitkanen was in 1994 allowed to post papers on the e-print archives now known as arXiv(obviously including the paper However, the USA edition omits the laudatory reference to Paul Ginsparg that is found in the UK edition. to draw the obvious conclusion, Wilczek seems willing to entertain reservations about current attempts to join quantum mechanics and general relativity and to go out on his own looking for new ones, as in the case of this paper. As a general matter of philosophy though, I very much agree with Penrose’s point of view about Kaluza-Klein. You’ve got enough trouble dealing with the metric degrees of freedom of space-time. You’re just making things worse when you add in a dynamical metric for the fibers of your principal bundle or for some internal space.