Another one of these scientists's half-hearted attempt at getting a few dollars out of the public's curiosity for anything 'stringy' and 'cosmy'. I must say that this latest effort is more honest than most, but mostly more clumsy. Penrose is more honest in the sense that a lot of the research spelled out in excruciating details is actually his own or that of his collaborators. More clumsy because of low quality illustrations, referred to by a notation system that is counterintuitive (in the accompanying PDF, illustration 2.9 appears pages BEFORE 2.14. ) Worse still, the choice of a narrator is awful, a voice that takes several chapters getting used to. I suppose that the tone and timbre chosen was to match that of the old professor, but it sounds shakingly feeble and quite monotonous, certainly no match for the excellent voice in Richard Panek's 4% Universe.

the first part is a good exposition of historical development leading to the standard model.

give the job to someone else, possibly a reader that understands physics and takes throat drops.

some of it was

Forget all string theorists and read outside the box - This trend is getting to be very annoying, too much dogma by too many priests who copy each other with too much hype. Avoid any book that uses the word 'profound' more than 100 times, as Dr Susskind's latest book does. Those books are deeply superficial and provide glorified snakeoil with narcissistic overtones. Penrose avoids some of that, and this is why I bought the book. Buy at your own risk.

Somehow Roger Penrose has a reputation as an explainer of cutting-edge scientific ideas to the lay public. This is the first of his books that I have read, and I am disappointed.

A major technical problem with the audiobook is the constant references to a PDF of diagrams which makes the discussion impossible to follow while driving or working in the garden.

But beyond that, the author steps way back and teaches us the physics of Entropy in tedious detail. I suspect it is a cover for the fact that he, and no one else, really understands time at all! Perhaps they think that if they can make us fall asleep listening to the finer points of entropy, we will believe that our great scientists must really understand this. But I believe that if they understood time, they would be able to explain it.

When he talks about the universe and cosmology, he takes something of great beauty and deep mystery, and somehow makes it boring and dry. It is like the entomologist who would rather keep a collection of dead insects under glass than watch the creatures living in the wild. All the beauty and wonder are sucked out of it.

It is as if the subject of cosmology has had all the mystical lifeblood drained out of it, and its dead remains were pressed into the pages of this book. Buried deep in this pile of ashes is the suggestion that the universe goes through great cycles of expansion and contraction. Doesn't that sound marvelous? So why does it sound so boring in the pages of this book?

Someone who already knows about the subject and just wants equations he can't see.

There is no story -- at least for the first 30 minutes when I gave up. It's more like a math textbook, and that translates horribly to storytelling, especially for audio, when it requires looking at equations and mentions diagrams we can't see.

I don't know, but this narrator came off as pretentious which didn't help this subject.

These kinds of subjects -- quantum physics, relativity etc. -- can work but you have to tell a story. You can't get into equations and diagrams when you can't see them. For audio, you must tell a compelling story instead of just be a reference book.

Four similar books that know how to tell a story are: The Age of Entanglement, Quantum, Parallel Worlds, The Grand Design.