The Impossible Man

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A "beautifully composed and revealing" ( Financial Times ) biography of the dazzling and painful life of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose—"a stunning achievement" (Kai Bird, American Prometheus ). 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