Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

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.

I recommend downloading the PDF. If you can???t understand the PDF without reading the book ??? don???t bother. Now if you find the PDF fascinating, then try the book. It is really not a book that does well with audio unless you are already very familiar with the subject and have excellent multidimensional visualization skills. This book has a truly excellent description of entropy and the second law it is worth it just for that analysis. I don???t find the overall thrust of the book compelling, but it points out very important defects of the basic big bang theory which must be addressed one way or another.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

An excellent book, especially if you're a fan of his classic work "The Road to Reality". He is not shy about mathematical equations or concepts and the lay person that invests the time to go through this book will be very well rewarded.

This audible version comes with a lengthy PDF file with Penrose's trademark hand drawn diagrams. His diagrams are probably some of the best tools I've ever seen to make difficult concepts accessible to the non-physicist or mathematician.

Narration was adequate.

I was excited to read a book by Penrose, after hearing so much about him in books by Hawking and others. But unlike books by Hawking, Brian Greene and other excellent choices on Audible, this one was not cut out for audio. It comes with a PDF reference guide, and unless you can visualize things like q3-dimensional space and conformal representations of hyperbolic geometry, you really need to have the reference guide in front of you through almost the entire listen.

This book seems perfect for a Nova documentary. Animation would make it so much more accessible. I would be captivated by a well-made couple hour documentary.

About the narrator: At times I felt like I was listening to a British Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory). He narrated with a rapid and awkward cadence and had a weird habit of starting the first word of a sentence with 'Ah-.

Fascinating topic, but I didn't get much out of this book trying to listen to it in the car.

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.