Describe Yams to the English - "they're like potatoes", only they're not. You realise that when you first taste them, feel cheated by the description others have offered you, then find yourself using it yourself, for want of a better. So it is with books on modern physics, or modern mathematics. These are subjects in which the inmates are in charge of the asylums. It doesn't have to be so, but looks like being so for the forseeable future, for organisational and economic reasons. Who can exorcise, in six hundred pages, the terror of fifteen years of incompetent teaching, half-baked syllabuses, and horrifying examinations? Most attempts merely repeat that trauma. This book is quite the best account of modern physics and mathematics that I have ever come across. It's written by a visionary who has the deep respect of both physicists and mathematicians, and, to me at least, seems to represent a popularisation of the merging of pure mathematics with the mathematic! s of physics, which has been going on since the time of Dirac and Eddington. Penrose makes you believe that it's reasonable to cross the corridors of academe from Quantum Mechanics to Algebraic Topology, and back via Logic and Machine theory without being conscious of barriers; and, that it's reasonable that the people who pay for these games with their taxes might be initiated into them. A beautiful, brilliant book, by a master mathematician at the height of his powers. How do we relate to a subject? In my view, through inspirational journalism. We all "know" that mathematics is a game for young men; because elderly, elegant, Hardy told us so, despite being an obvious counterexample. Just about every distinguished mathematician is rushing into print with their own impenetrable view of the world. In a situation in which the unreadable "Brief History of Time" is an international best seller, you'd suspect that no-one could come up with an account of mat! hematics which is accurate but which also captures the shee! r joy of being involved in it. If anyone has managed that, it is Penrose, with this incredible book.
