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Article: Theory of everything.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- October 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Roger Penrose The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide" to the Laws of the Universe. Jonathan Cape, 1094 pages, 30 [pounds sterling]
The mathematical physicist and cosmologist Roger Penrose, now professor emeritus at Oxford University, is best known to mathematicians for his discovery of Penrose tiles. These are two four-sided polygons that tile the plane only in a nonperiodic way, that is, without a fundamental region that repeats periodically like the hexagonal tiling of a bathroom floor, or the amazing tesselations of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. To everyone's surprise, including Penrose's, his whimsical tiling turned out to underlie a previously unknown type of ...