Cycles of Time

An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

By: Roger Penrose

Narrated by: Bruce Mann

Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

From the best-selling author of The Emperor’s New Mind and The Road to Reality, a groundbreaking book that provides new views on three of cosmology’s most profound questions: What, if anything, came before the Big Bang? What is the source of order in our universe? What is its ultimate future?

Current understanding of our universe dictates that all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with huge black holes finally evaporating away into massless energy. Roger Penrose - one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time - turns around this predominant picture of the universe’s “heat death,” arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the “Big Bang” of a new one.

Along the way to this remarkable cosmological picture, Penrose sheds new light on basic principles that underlie the behavior of our universe, describing various standard and nonstandard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmic microwave background, and the key status of black holes. Ideal for both the amateur astronomer and the advanced physicist - with plenty of exciting insights for each - Cycles of Time is certain to provoke and challenge.

Intellectually thrilling and accessible, this is another essential guide to the universe from one of our preeminent thinkers.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2011 Roger Penrose (P)2011 Random House

Difficult, Awe-inducing and Fascinating

Wow, this is a challenging book. I was tempted to stop listening at various points, but it was usually there that Penrose dropped in a gem of insight or an utterly fascinating speculation on the nature of the universe, and on I went. I finally settled in when I realized that I was listening to a unique book: it is written for the general reader, but it doesn't try to soft pedal any of the complexity of thought that leads to the conclusions. In the end, I loved it.

What is the book about? Penrose is proposing an admittedly conjectural notion of universal cosmology. He is, in fact, making a new argument for something like the balanced beauty of the old Steady State idea of the universe's orgin and life while using all the new stuff on black holes, the cosmic background radiation and black holes. He's attempting to reconcile the Big Bang with a steady state by arguing that at the extreme end of things -- the heat death of the universe after all the black holes have evaporated and all that remains are mass-less protons, gravitons and such -- the geometry of the universe will match the geometry necessarily in place at the time of the Big Bang. And things could, thus, start all over again or, as Penrose puts it, bounce. We could be somewhere in the midst of an endless cycle of expanding and "bouncing" universes.

Whether or not you buy Penrose's conclusion, the road there is hard, awe-inducing and fascinating.

I highly recommending downloading his cool illustration packet, many handdrawn, and referring to them from time to time, as well.

Don't Go Here Unless...

This is very difficult to digest. I loved it, but must reread(listen). This is a fascinating book in at least the regard to helping one realize, after reading a handful of physics books written for laymen, that physics is not as easy as one may think. If you hang out in the Science and Physics portion of Audible you have to give this one a try. Enjoy!

Not a good subject for audio

Roger Penrose is a world famous cosmologist with interesting things to say. Unfortunately, the spoken language by itself is not adequate. The serious reader or listener must have at hand the charts if he is to make any sense of his arguments.

Good but heard to comprehend

Dr Penrose is a brilliant person but I find his writing style filled with lots of extra words. I really have to think hard to get what he is saying. This is just my style of writing. Many other very technical writers are able to express their ideas more efficiently.

An extraordinary book -- highly recommended

An extraordinary book. I read and reread and re-listened it (it is in Audible format also) several times.
Penrose writing is thoughtful, with high scientific integrity, always stating strong and weak points. An absolute delight to think about — highly recommended

A Poor Choice

There are some books that are manifestly not suitable for audio presentation and this book is a fine example. First, let me say that I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics and have worked in the field for my entire career. Consequently, I am already somewhat familiar with the material and am certainly able to understand it. However, in audio format it is IMPOSSIBLE to follow. Reading out tensor equations is simply not reasonable. Fortunately the diagrams (which are very germane to the explanation) are available in the .pdf format, but if I had wanted to view them visually, I would have simply bought the book. I also found the order of his arguments to be peculiar and not very useful. A simple summary of the main points of his theory would have helped immensely instead of forcing the listener to take notes as one went along in order to follow it. I fear that this presentation will simply discourage the casual 'reader' from any further interest in cosmology.

Impenetrable

It begins with giving some scientific analogies for the layman, but it soon leaps into calculations and language that I couldn't hope to follow.

Tedious, dull, difficult

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?

Not a good audiobook

I only got through the first 2 sections. It’s really hard to follow math in audiobook form and there’s a lot of it and it’s graduate-level statistical mechanics.

No PDF, difficult to follow

The narrator instructs the listener to refer to the PDF, clearly indicating that it should be included. This is a chronic problem with Audible Books, reference to a pdf, but none available. With this book, it makes it impossible to follow. It's like reading an 18th century math book, tedious, impossible to follow.
If you're interested, get a paper copy, I know more about the ideas in this book from reading a press report than after an hour of listening. Big disappointment.