The Road to Reality (a refuge from politics)

It's a book by the British mathematician Roger Penrose.  Not that I've actually read it--it's really hard stuff.  I have, however, been thumbing through it.  I checked it out from the library & I think I'm going to buy it.  I plan to spend a few minutes every day trying to read it for full (well, relatively full) understanding.   (I think it will help me take my mind off Obama's potentially diastrous decision to put consideration of "entitlement reform" on the table.) The thing is, Penrose is such a lucid writer that I now have the impression I could actually understand what he's saying if I merely applied myself a little.  For example, he has a discussion of complex numbers, that is computations involving the square root of -1, that not only shows how a body can manipulate them just like ordinary algebriac equations, but also illustrates how such computations are applied in discussions of events at the level of quarks and electrons &
stuff.  Not that I really understood what he was saying, but he inspired hope that I could by a little more careful & determined reading.   In that discussion, Penrose apologizes for flinging all that math out there--he was making some kind of larger point about the relationship between reality and math.  Later on, there's much hairier looking math that he doesn't seem to apologize for, so I assume that it's not as hairy as it looks. 

Penrose is also interesting from a philosophical point of view.  He is an avowed mathematical Platonist who believes that mathematical reality is independent of, and somehow is antecedent to, what we normally think of as physical reality.  In fact, judging from a couple of diagrams later in the book, he is also a Platonic Platonist, who believes that ideals like Truth and Beauty are also prior to, and independent of, any particular instantiation in physical reality.  But I will have to read and see. 

I was really kind of hoping he would prove sympathetic to my own prejudices against black holes and the Big Bang Cosmology, but I'm not sensing that he wants to go there.  One alternative to the Big Bang theory is plasma cosmology.  It is strongly dissed by most physicists and cosmologists but has some proponents, like Nobel Laureate Alfven and Hans Arp, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute, who have strong credentials.  Plasma cosmology emphases the importance of electrical currents in interstellar space as opposed to gravity.   Mainstream physicists readily acknowledge that the stars are balls of plasma, but attribute the energy they emit to fusion processes brought on by the compressive effects of gravity.  Plasma cosmologists argue that the energy generated by stars is actually due to electrical currents circulating in space that energize the plasma that is the stars in much the same way that a current makes a neon bulb glow...the currents
also generate powerful magnetic fields that generate the twists and spirals of interstellar gas in the universe much the way they can in laboratories on earth...I read in Science Daily News a while back that astronomers have observed spirals of interstellar dust formed by magnetic forces that have a curious resemblance to DNA.  Somebody  speculated that perhaps plasma spirals were the templates for DNA...that's a bit much, even for me.    

Also, I happen to know that Penrose (along with Stuart Hameroff) has an interesting idea about the origin of consciousness in quantum events that take place in the microtubes of the brain, but that's another story. 
 
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