Read the other 12 books? There's more books after this one? zomg

I think he means the books are read in parallel. Certain books will expand on the topics in the chapters and as we go along we will be dipping into them.

You know, I've had this book for years and never read it through completely. I think it'll be fun. Hopefully I don't get too busy with work and can contribute to the group.

Great to have another person on board.

I am hoping to have a first draft of my dissertation done by close of play Sunday so my time should free up a bit. So I am game to start this some time next week.

Cool. What field is your dissertation in?

Normally, I'm interested to join this group as well. I am currently preparing for a cognitive neuroscience program and I need to improve my background both in physics and math. But could you give a sense to the type of things you need to know to be able to read the book? I'm asking about the required level of math to even have a chance to grasp it.

It depends on what your goals are as far as understanding. You will gain no skill at actually doing computations from this book. You might, if you're persistent, get vague familiarity with the historical development of theoretical physics. I only read the first few chapters, which were more historical development of math. I thought they were pretty good, but they're not how you'd want to learn anything. They're more interesting perspectives or ideas after you already have a pretty good idea what's going on. Some of the exercises presented as footnotes can be pretty beastly, as I recall; it's a real stretch to imagine that the general audience Penrose insists he's addressing would have a shot at some of them.

If you're seriously trying to work on math, this is not the book for you. Find specific things you think you need to know and learn those things. If you're interested in a 30000 ft. view of the more renowned aspects of theoretical physics, then you might enjoy this book. The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a truly outstanding book that the latter type of reader might also enjoy.

Thanks. I might delay reading the book in that case.

I took a look at the contents and there are some stuff that I'm definitely familiar with, at least looking at the titles. What is the highest level of math that I need to be good at in order for this book to become readable for me, so to speak?

In the interest of encouraging the more tentative people I'll explain my own goals and level more clearly.

Since dropping them after GCSEs my only contact with maths has been through poker and the general basic calculations required for the endless photo-spectrometry practicals one does in undergrad Biochemistry and with physics are via the odd New Scientist Article.

I've always taken a pretty broad interest in learning and feel that Maths and Physics are the only major fields where my ignorance is so profound that I can't even have a conversation with those who practice them about large parts of their subject.

My aim in reading this, as well as setting myself a bit of a challenge, is to get to the point where I have a grasp of of how the land lies in Physics and hopefully will pick up a sense of how the maths works (not enough to solve or derive anything but enough to chat about it).

Whatever your level if you are interested you may as well give it a go. If it is too much detail you can settle for a general understanding and if it is simply to much then there is no shame in calling it quits or simply spectating.

Go for it.

So I just bought this book because of this thread and skimmed through some of it. It looks pretty much like a physics text book. I've heard some basic physics lecturs and know how to calc a double integral or what stokes thm is. Yet at first sight there are a lot of notations which are totally unclear to me, so I think this is going to be a very slow read. If you can call it read, more like a study.

a big NO WAY from me

Cool. Good to have you on board.

Thats why its called a study group.

Edit: not sure if you meant "NO WAY" to joining us or to it being for the lay-man. If the first then:
If the latter then: You still in?

Again, it really depends on how you define readable. I think you can get something out of it with very little math at all; conversely, I think it's unlikely that anybody will truly understand much of the later portions of the book unless they are theoretical physics or math Ph.D's who basically already know what is being discussed.

I guess I'd recommend, if you have access to a copy, taking a look at the chapters on symmetries and maybe calculus on manifolds. If those aren't too terrifying, then I think a fair number of the earlier physics chapters will be worthwhile.

I once started reading this as well and though I enjoyed it, one thing was really a dealbreaker for me and was the reason I stopped reading. The thing was the notation, which I found very cumbersome and unnecessarily complicated. iirc he kind of invented his own notation for some of the stuff - stuff that seemed to be perfectly representable by the "normal" mathematical entities (vectors, matrices, tensors etc).

Maybe it is my background in math which has made me unsusceptible to different notations, but I remember being put down by not being able to follow many of the arguments purely because of the notation. This was some chapters in, I think, and I enjoyed the first ones, so I think its an ok read.

One will stand to gain a lot more by instead picking up the Greiner series of physics books or the Weinberg series of quantum field theory or the Landau series or even basic classical mechanics books like Goldstein or the QM books by Sakurai or Tannoudji or Schiff also general books on QM historical papers or general books on standard model, the Weinberg book on Gravitation and cosmology , all books by Feynman on everything he wrote (from his lectures to statistical mechanics and path integrals, QED etc ), all books by Einstein and so much more lol. (You get the picture how ridiculously demanding it gets?). I salute anyone who reads and honestly understands all this book for clearly it means they have "read" effectively the ones i referenced above as well!!!

So then read the Penrose book too together with the above and others for motivation to read what else is needed (from these other books aside to what you already know-each to their own life-story lol) so that finally his book starts making sense. Honestly i have no idea what his objective in authoring it was (other than personal legacy and worthy of him to do as solid summary anyway) moreover the fact that it is good to own if familiar with the topics and read it every now and then (it mostly fits an audience of experimental physicists wanting to see what theorists do or grad students, very advanced undergrads of physics or mathematicians that want to get a physics angle of things they already know from pure math, maybe ambitious good at math engineers ,brilliant med/biology scientists with strong math background interested in wanting to see what they missed by not going into physics lol etc) . It is in no way in hell intended for general even somewhat advanced audiences but for the few early chapters. For these early ones up to say the 50% of the book its ok if the reader is motivated and university educated, for general audiences only probably the first 20% or so lol.