AIP Chief Research Officer Trevor Owens recently interviewed journalist and author Patchen Barss by email about his 2024 biography The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius . In the book, Barss takes readers through Penrose’s life and work in theoretical physics and mathematics. Along the way, it also opens broader questions about how to tell stories of the lives of scientists, especially when navigating the complexities of memory, personal correspondence, and contested recollections.

Barss’s research involved an extensive set of new interviews with figures across Penrose’s life, alongside deep engagement with archival materials. In the interview, Barss reflects on the challenges of scientific biography, what archival sources can reveal (or obscure), and how working with theoretical physicists reshaped his own understanding of science.

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Trevor Owens: You’ve written widely on science and culture, but this is your first book-length biography. What drew you to Roger Penrose, and how did your view of science and scientists evolve over the five years you spent researching and writing the book?

Patchen Barss: As a journalist and personally, I have a longstanding fascination with the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. In 2018, I wrote a book for children about patterns in nature. It encouraged kids to explore how the shapes of things—rivers, stones, plants, animals, etc.—are not only beautiful but also reveal secrets about why things are the way they are.

Penrose’s work as a mathematician and physicist embodies this intersection of visual beauty, geometry, and scientific insight. His scientific diagrams are works of art, and his tiling patterns and optical illusions have the power to connect even non-mathematical people to the relationships between shape and meaning.

Many eminent scientists I interviewed used words like “magic” and “epiphany” to describe Penrose’s work. I wanted to understand the sources of his creative inspiration and unusual talents. Inevitably, Penrose’s contributions to cosmology and mathematics were grounded in the friends, colleagues, and everyday events that shaped him.This journey deepened my appreciation for the deeply human factors that drive even the most esoteric science.

Owens: Your account is grounded in both personal interviews and archival research. How did those two modes of inquiry interact for you as a writer? Did they pull in different directions, or open up different layers of Penrose’s life and work?

Barss: In the book, I talk about how a human life isn’t like a jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces fit together perfectly to form a single, coherent picture. In biography, you never have all the pieces, and the ones you do have don’t always mesh, or else they connect in multiple contradictory ways. Memories, documents, old interviews and new ones don’t ever line up nicely to create a definitive portrait. But it was less that the writing was pulled in different directions, and more that I wanted readers to sit with the kinds of contradictions and inconsistencies that are inherent in any life story.

Owens: At one point, you cite an oral history from our archives: a 1989 interview with Penrose conducted by Alan Lightman. What role did that interview play in your research, and what kinds of insights did it offer that other sources didn’t?

Barss: A biography (or any work of history) must endeavor to reconstruct past eras as accurately as possible, avoiding the danger of retroactively imposing current ideas, feelings, sensibilities, etc. The AIP interview provided a kind of intimacy, a window into what Penrose was thinking and feeling decades ago, and how he viewed his journey up to that point. It allowed me to compare 1989 Penrose to the person I was interviewing in the 2020s, and map his personal and scientific evolution.

Owens: There’s a striking scene in the book where you and Penrose open a bundle of more than two hundred of his letters—documents that he hadn’t seen in decades. What was that moment like for you as a biographer? Did you know then it would become part of the narrative? More broadly, how did that encounter shape your understanding of his story?

Barss: I didn’t know what to expect when Penrose first mentioned these letters, or when he brought them with him from England to Canada. We read and reviewed each letter together, which meant I was receiving insight into his life in the 1970s and ’80s at the same time he was providing contemporaneous commentary.

There are many ways to explore the humanity behind a scientist like Penrose. Many science narratives, though, focus on certain human qualities—curiosity, brilliance, skepticism, stubbornness, and so on, to the exclusion of others. I believe the progress of science depends on much more—on the appreciation of beauty, on the desire to love and be loved, on questions of self-worth, on delight and disgust and desire and despair and everything else that makes us human. These letters were an important source that allowed me to explore a much wider and deeper range of motivating factors in his work.

Owens: Through your research, you spent half a decade immersed in the personalities and intellectual cultures of theoretical physics and mathematics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. What did you come to understand, perhaps differently than when you began, about the nature of work and life in those fields?

Barss: There are many ways to answer this, but one of the most powerful impacts was the sense of excitement in the cosmological community through those decades. They were peeling back the layers of the universe, peering inside black holes, breaking the universe down into its most fundamental particles and forces, modeling what the first moments of time and space looked like. There was an audacity to their underlying assumption that mere humans could understand the entirety of reality, from individual photons to galaxy filaments.

Owens: You interviewed Penrose many times but also spoke with a wide range of people who knew him in different contexts. Those accounts don’t always align. They sometimes diverge or directly contradict one another. How did you navigate those conflicting perspectives, and what guided your decisions about how to present them in the story?

Barss: I’ve already mentioned the folly of attempting to resolve the unresolvable contradictions that come with being human. On a more practical level, though, I did my best to verify people’s memories and stories through archival research. When other sources shared memories or observations of Penrose, I always gave him opportunities to respond.

Certain stories did rely largely on people’s recollections, most notably those of Penrose himself. In these cases, I worked to be transparent about what sources I was drawing on. Often, the way someone remembers a story is at least as important as the verifiable details—it can reveal much about how they see themselves and how they understand what made them into the person they are today.

Owens: Finally, are there particular biographies of physical scientists that shaped your approach to this book? What works, literary or historical, were most influential as you crafted the narrative? What is it about those books that you think makes them particularly powerful or valuable?

Barss: I’ll try to keep this as short as I can. While I was writing, I read Ananyo Bhattacharya’s biography of John Von Neumann, The Man from the Future; David Schwartz’s biography of Enrico Fermi, The Last Man Who Knew Everything; and Robert Kanigel’s biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. (In addition to the way these authors integrated a life story with an exploration of scientific ideas, they also clearly influenced my choice of book title.) Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Disordered Cosmos expanded my ideas about how to humanize science. Katie Mack’s The End of Everything has the kind of personal, poetic writing about the cosmos I aspire to. Kip Thorne and Lia Haloran’s collaboration, The Warped Side of Our Universe, demonstrates the intimate relationship between artistic and scientific creativity. I often revisit Carlo Rovelli’s books, which I think many science writers would agree are pinnacles of the genre.

Trevor Owens
American Institute of Physics
towens@aip.org

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