My first GEB, I traded for a complete works of Shakespeare. The second is sitting on a shelf alongside Fluid Analogies. Thinking about the GEB phenomenon today, boggles my mind. Sure it won a Pulitzer. But it was a best seller. That's how different the world was...non-fiction could be thick and highly technical and sell in volume to the general public...it didn't need to be a new journalistic summary or popular history, it could have long passages that many readers wouldn't fully understand and puzzles that they could not solve. A non-fiction book could require the reader to work. Not vague self-improvement homework, but intellectually in the present moment of the text. It was OK for a book to be hard. GEB is a piece of genius that would never get off the ground today. Basic Books is part of a conglomerate and self-publishing isn't a replacement.
So far as I can tell, without a graduate degree in physics, that book is a giant bucket full of minced-up grad-level math, and Penrose is a pretty terrible guide to it.
On the up side it made me think I should put some time and effort into understanding the math and the ideas. That was nearly fifteen years ago now, and it's turned out to be a lot of fun as an occasional side hobby.
On the down side, he completely fails to make even relatively simple concepts either simple or accessible.
When you spend your life surrounded by some of the smartest grad students in the world, you're going to have a very unrealistic idea of what the average human can understand. Of of how to explain things to the average human in a way that makes understanding more likely.
Infuriating book - but I'm still glad he wrote it, and that I tried to read it.
Mr Penrose does not pander to anyone when he writes. You get the whole lot and that's the way I like it as a civilian. TR2R was published 2006 so not recently.
I will admit to getting a bit bamboozled quite often ...
