The Road to Reality

”Road to reality” by Roger Penrose is an interesting book as a refresher and review if the content is otherwise within familiar territory.

I would be absolutely flabbergasted if a layman could get through Road to Reality. Even those with an engineering or computer science background would struggle considerably. That said, it serves as a great overview of physics for mathematicians and perhaps as very casual intro to twistor theory for physicists.

I have a love-hate relationship with that book. 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). Feynman's Lectures are much more complete in that sense, even though as other comments on this thread note, the reader may not be able to use the learning to solve practical problems without going beyond Feynman's lectures.

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.

As it happens I bought both Road to Reality and Lectures on Physics at the same time, about 14 year ago. I read and re-read Lectures on Physics but I was never able to finish Road to Reality. I have kept my aging copy and hope to one day get through it, but it's a MUCH more difficult read, at least in my opinion.

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. [1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=154

Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler The Road to Reality by Penrose The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli "For a long time, we have tried to understand the world in terms of some primary substance. Perhaps physics, more than any other discipline, has pursued this primary substance. But the more we have studied it, the less the world seems comprehensible in terms of something that is. It seems to be a lot more intelligible in terms of relations between events. ... We therefore describe the world as it happens, not as it is. Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are...we understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. Things in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous. But only before returning to dust, everything returns to dust.…