I was unprepared for the Roger Penrose that I met in The Impossible Man. As a PhD student training in relativity and quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, I once got to sit next to Penrose. Unsure of what to say to the man whose ideas about black-hole singularities are arguably why I took an interest in becoming a physicist, I asked him how he had come up with the idea for the space-time diagrams now known as “Penrose diagrams”.
Penrose explained to me that he simply couldn’t make sense of space-time without them, that was all. He spoke in kind terms, something I wasn’t quite used to. I was more familiar with people reacting as if my questions were stupid or impertinent. What I felt from Penrose – who eventually shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for his work on singularities – was humility and generosity.
The Penrose of The Impossible Man isn’t so much humble as oblivious and, in my reading, quite spoiled
In hindsight, I wonder if I overread him, or if, having been around too many brusque theoretical physicists, my bar as a PhD student was simply too low. The Penrose of The Impossible Man isn’t so much humble as oblivious and, in my reading, quite spoiled. As a teenager he was especially good at taking care of his sister and her friends, generous with his time and thoughtfulness. But it ends there.
As we learn in this biography – written by the Canadian journalist Patchen Barss – one of those young friends, Judith Daniels, later became the object of Penrose’s affection when he was a distinguished faculty member at the University of Oxford in his 40s. A significant fraction of the book is centred on Penrose’s relationship with Daniels, whom he became reacquainted with in the early 1970s when she was an undergraduate studying mathematics at John Cass College in London.
At the time Penrose was unhappily married to Joan, an American he’d met in 1958 when he was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge. In Barss’s telling, Penrose essentially forces Daniels into the position of muse. He writes her copious letters explaining his intellectual ideas and communicating his inability to get his work done without replies from her, which he expects to contain critical analyses of his scientific proposals.
The letters are numerous and obsessive, even when her replies are thin and distant. Eventually, Penrose also begins to request something more – affection and even love. He wants a relationship with her. Barss never exactly states that this was against Daniels’s will, but he offers readers sufficient details of her letters to Penrose that it’s hard to draw another conclusion.
Unanswered questions
Barss was able to read her letters because they had been returned to Penrose after Daniels’s death in 2005. Penrose, however, never re-examined any of them until Barss interviewed him for this biography. This raises a lot of questions that remain unanswered by the end of the book. In particular, why did Daniels continue to participate in a correspondence that was eventually thousands of pages long on Penrose’s side?
Judith Daniels was a significant figure in Penrose’s life, yet her death and memory seem to have been unremarkable to him for much of his later life
My theory is that Daniels felt she owed it to this great man of science. She also confesses at one point that she had a childhood crush on him. Her affection was real, even if not romantic; it is as if she was trapped in the dynamic. Penrose’s lack of curiosity about the letters after her death is also strange to me. Daniels was a significant figure in his life, yet her death and memory seem to have been unremarkable to him for much of his later life.
By the mid-1970s, when Daniels was finally able to separate herself from what was – on Penrose’s side – an extramarital emotional affair, Penrose went seeking new muses. They were always female students of mathematics and physics.
Just when it seems like we’ve met the worst of Penrose’s treatment of women, we’re told about his “physical aggression” toward his eventual ex-wife Joan and his partial abandonment of the three sons they had together. This is glossed over very quickly. And it turns out there is even more.
Penrose, like many of his contemporaries, primarily trained male students. Eventually he did take on one woman, Vanessa Thomas, who was a PhD student in his group at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute, where he’d moved in 1972.
Thomas never finished her PhD; Penrose pursued her romantically and that was the end of her doctorate. As scandalous as this is, I didn’t find the fact of the romance especially shocking because it is common enough in physics, even if it is increasingly frowned upon and, in my opinion, generally inappropriate. For better or worse, I can think of other examples of men in physics who fell in love with women advisees.
But in all the cases I know of, the woman has gone on to complete her degree either under his or someone else’s supervision. In these same cases, the age difference was usually about a decade. What happened with Thomas – who married Penrose in 1988 – seems like the worst-case scenario: a 40-year age difference and a budding star of mathematics, reduced to serving her husband’s career. Professional boundaries were not just transgressed, but obliterated.
Barss chooses not to offer much in the way of judgement about the impact that Penrose had on the women in science whom he made into muses and objects of romantic affection. The only exception is Ivette Fuentes, who was already a star theoretical physicist in her own right when Penrose first met her in 2012. Interview snippets with Fuentes reveal that the one time Penrose spoke of her as a muse, she rejected him and their friendship until he apologized.
No woman, it seems, had ever been able to hold him to the fire before. Fuentes does, however, describe how Penrose gave her an intellectual companion, something she’d previously been denied by the way the physics community is structured around insider “families” and pedigrees. It is interesting to read this in the context of Penrose’s own upbringing as landed gentry.
Gilded childhood
An intellectually precocious child growing up in 1930s England, Penrose is handed every resource for his intellectual potential to blossom. When he notices a specific pattern linking addition and multiplication, an older sibling is on hand to show him there’s a general rule from number theory that explains the pattern. The family at this point, we’re told, has a cook and a maid who doubles as a nanny. Even in a community of people from well-resourced backgrounds, Penrose stands out as an especially privileged example.
When the Second World War starts, his family readily secures safe passage to a comfortable home in Canada – a privilege related to their status as welcomed members of Britain’s upper class and one that was not afforded to many continental European Jewish families at the time (Penrose’s mother and therefore Penrose was Jewish by descent). Indeed, Canada admitted the fewest Jewish refugees of any Allied nation and famously denied entry to the St Louis, which was sent back to Europe, where a third of its 937 Jewish passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.
In Ontario, the Penrose children have a relatively idyllic experience. Throughout the rest of his childhood and his adult life, the path has been continuously smoothed for Penrose, either by his parents (who bought him multiple homes) or mentors and colleagues who believed in his genius. One is left wondering how many other people might have such a distinguished career if, from birth, they are handed everything on a silver platter and never required to take responsibility for anything.
To tell these and later stories, Barss relies heavily on interviews with Penrose. Access to their subject for any biographer is tricky. While it creates a real opportunity for the author, there is also the challenge of having a relationship with someone whose memories you need to question. Barss doesn’t really interrogate Penrose’s memory but seems to take them as gospel.
During the first half of the book, I wondered repeatedly if The Impossible Man is effectively a memoir told in the third person. Eventually, Barss does allow other voices to tell the story. Ultimately, though, this is firmly a book told from Penrose’s point of view. Even the inclusion of Daniels’s story was at least in part at Penrose’s behest.
I found myself wanting to hear more from the women in Penrose’s life. Penrose often saw himself following a current determined by these women. He came, for example, to believe his first wife had essentially trapped him in their relationship by falling for him.
Penrose never takes responsibility for any of his own actions towards the women in his life. So I wondered: how did they see it? What were their lives like? His ex-wife Joan (who died in 2019) and estranged wife Vanessa, who later became a mathematics teacher, both gave interviews for the book. But we learn little about their perspective on the man whose proclivities and career dominated their own lives.
One day there will be another biography of Penrose that will necessarily have distance from its subject because he will no longer be with us. The Impossible Man will be an important document for any future biographer, containing as it does such a close rendering of Penrose’s perspective on his own life.
The cost of genius
When it comes to describing Penrose’s contributions to mathematics and physics, the science writing, especially in the early pages, sings. Barss has a knack for writing up difficult ideas – whether it’s Penrose’s Nobel-prize-winning work on singularities or his attempt at quantum gravity, twistor theory. Overall, the luxurious prose makes the book highly readable.
Sometimes Barss indulges cosmic flourishes in a way that appears to reinforce Penrose’s perspective that the universe is happening to him rather than one over which he has any influence. In the end, I don’t know if we learn the cost of genius, but we certainly learn the cost of not recognizing that we are a part of the universe that has agency.
The final chapter is really Barss writing about himself and Penrose, and the conversations they have together. Penrose has macular degeneration now, so while both are on a visit to Perimeter in 2019, Barss reads some of his letters to Judith back to Penrose. Apparently, Penrose becomes quite emotional in a way that it seems no-one had ever seen – he weeps.
After that, he asks Barss to include the story about Judith. So, on some level, he knows he has erred.
The end of The Impossible Man is devastating. Barss describes how he eventually gains access to two of Penrose’s sons (three with Joan and one with Vanessa). In those interviews, he hears from children who have been traumatized by witnessing what they call “physical aggression” toward their mother. Even so, they both say they’d like to improve their relationship with their father.
Barss then asks a 92-year-old Penrose if he wants to patch things up with his family. His reply: “I feel my life is busy enough and if I get involved with them, it just distracts from other things.” As Barss concludes, Penrose is persistently unwilling to accept that in his life, he has been in the driver’s seat. He has had choices and doesn’t want to take responsibility for that. This, as much as Penrose’s intellectual interests and achievements, is the throughline of the text.
Penrose has shown that he doesn’t really care what others think, as long as he gets what he wants scientifically
The Penrose we meet at the end of The Impossible Man has shown that he doesn’t really care what others think, as long as he gets what he wants scientifically. It’s clear that Barss has a real affection for him, which makes his honesty about the Penrose he finds in the archives all the more remarkable. Perhaps motivated by generosity toward Penrose, Barss also lets the reader do a lot of the analysis.
I wonder, though, how many physicists who are steeped in this culture, and don’t concern themselves with gender equity issues, will miss how bad some of Penrose’s behaviour has been, as his colleagues at the time clearly did. The only documented objections to his behaviour seem more about him going off the deep end with his research into consciousness, cyclic theory and attacks on cosmic inflation.
As I worked on this review, I considered whether a different reviewer would have simply complained that the book has lots of stuff about Penrose’s personal messes that we don’t need to know. Maybe, to other readers, Penrose doesn’t come off quite as badly. For me, I prefer the hero I met in person rather than in the pages of this book. The Impossible Man is an important text, but it’s heartbreaking in the end.
- 2024 Basic Books (US)/Atlantic Books (UK) 352pp $32/£25hb
- In 2015 Physics World’s Tushna Commissariat interviewed Roger Penrose about his career. You can watch the video below
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