Road to Reality

It gets very advanced and probably can't be fully tackled without additional mathematical education, but it tries to be an honest exposition of the math needed for modern physics from the ground up without explicitly resorting to external knowledge. I would have loved a "this will teach you all of the math if you can get through it" book like this even if I never did manage to get through it.

on HN, 2020

Nobody else of Penrose's stature has ever attempted to go from zero to string theory in a single volume, with all the physics and mathematics explained and very little left out.

on HN, 2014

It elegantly shows how to think about the topics, but it also left me with many unanswered questions to which I could never find answers with any amount of Internet searching (even though those answers are known to the humankind, buried in a set of complex topic-specific books).

on HN, 2019

Penrose's 'Road to Reality' [1] is a kind primer on where the math comes from, as it applies to physics. Kind of a philosophical walkthrough of how math applies to physics. It is nowhere near as concise as Feynman's lectures, but it does complement them pretty well, while getting more into the math, and why the math is needed to describe various aspects of physical reality.

on HN, 2019

In this book, Roger Penrose a Nobel Prize winner in Physics for his contributions in mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology, provides background math to understand the book's contents in the first half of the book.

on HN, 2023

It definitely is quite difficult, but it's also very inspiring in finding various topics to read more. I must have bought at least 20 books from the vast bibliography in the appendix of the book.

on HN, 2019