The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius

Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions. One of these objects became known as the ‘Penrose triangle’.

The Penroses were a family of puzzlers. Father and sons amused themselves by constructing polyhedra out of wood and cardboard that could be taken apart and put together in interesting ways. Everyone played chess: Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated polygons that can cover an infinite plane without repeating patterns. The triangles and tiles have been taken up by mathematicians interested in algorithms for generating such things, by chemists investigating crystal structure, and by psychologists concerned with the way the mind makes sense of the external world, but for Penrose they were, for the most part, a bit of fun.

The puzzles that have preoccupied Penrose, though, belong to other cultural domains, and form the stuff of his brilliant career as a theoretical physicist, mathematician and cosmologist. In institutional terms, cosmology is a discipline like any other – ornithology, say, or immunology. Its distinctiveness as an intellectual enterprise is that its concerns are fundamental, all-encompassing. Why is there something rather than nothing? How did this something come to be? What is the beginning of everything and what is its end – if, indeed, it is legitimate to speak of beginnings and ends?

In this biggest of all sciences, Penrose is one of the biggest names: fellow of the Royal Society in 1972; appointed Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford in 1973; knighted in 1994; Order of Merit in 2000; the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 2008; the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. Several mathematical and physical concepts bear his name: the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems about black holes and, in general relativity, the Penrose diagram of space-time, the Penrose inequality and the Newman-Penrose formalism.

Cosmology is about everything. It subsumes all other disciplines – but only in principle. In practice, cosmology has little to contribute to our understanding of how birds lay eggs or how the human immune system recognises a coronavirus, yet cosmologists have an intellectual aura that encourages some of them to give their opinion on all sorts of things. The difference between the puzzles of cosmological science and the polyhedral puzzles of Penrose’s youth was, he believed, just a matter of scale. All of them were, in theory, solvable, provided you were clever enough. Penrose reckoned that he was.

How do you write a life like that? It is presumed that artists make things while scientists discover them, the lives of the first leaving traces in what their minds produce, the second not so much, or, in the case of very technical and abstract inquiries, not at all. We tend to think that Philip Roth bears a different relationship to Portnoy’s Complaint than Albert Einstein does to E=mc². Indeed, when Einstein was asked, aged 67, to reflect on his life, his 25-page ‘Autobiographical Notes’ was dense with equations and he insisted that little else needed to be said: ‘The essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.’ A life dedicated to solving the puzzle of how the physical world works is an effective escape. It delivers the physicist from the obligations and transactions of everyday life. What possible appeal could there be in stories about the passions and interests of people like that? You not only could, but you should, write the life of the mind without writing the life.

Around the middle of the past century, a different sentiment emerged in scientific biography and autobiography. When James Watson’s Double Helix appeared in 1968, it came as a shock. Its frankness about the no-holds-barred race to a Nobel Prize and the chase after young women (Watson called them ‘popsies’) was applauded for its revelation that scientists ‘were human too’ and at the same time condemned for its indiscretion. Biographers soon followed Watson’s lead: we learned that Newton played dirty in his contest with Leibniz over the invention of calculus; Darwin used his stomach upsets as an excuse to avoid public controversy; Einstein was a bad husband and an absent father.

Biographers commonly have to root about in the archives for this sort of backstage material, but Patchen Barss has an enormous advantage with his subject. Penrose is still alive and active – aged 93 – and supplied the richest seam of ‘personal’ stuff. Barss is a Canadian journalist whose previous work includes a children’s book about science and a historical study of pornography. Penrose agreed to years of interviews, and imposed no conditions on what Barss would publish. Some colleagues and relatives were dead; others were unwilling to speak; but many went on the record about their relations with him. Penrose spoke freely about his emotional life and supplied Barss with a huge cache of highly personal letters. There are, of course, ‘authorised biographies’ of living scientists, and there have been ‘warts and all’ personal reflections by Nobel-stature scientists themselves, most of which turn out to be self-celebrations, but it’s hard to think of any performance quite like The Impossible Man.

Penrose’s father and mother were both cold and distant; polyhedral puzzles were one of the few vehicles for father-son contact. That’s one reason the puzzles were something more than fun for the young Penrose. But they were also a big part of the reason he chose to do his first degree in mathematics, a decision strongly opposed by his father, who told him that ‘professional mathematicians are peculiar, unworldly people.’ He was worried that his son might already be too much like that. (A lonely and socially awkward student, Penrose had hit on a tactic for breaking the ice at parties: he constructed a Perspex tetrahedron and brought it along to interest young women. Mathematics was, Barss writes, a ‘sex substitute’.) Penrose’s doctorate was in theoretical physics, but he maintained a life-long Platonic disposition to see the mathematical, especially the geometrical, as fundamentally real. It was through mathematics that the physical world would be made intelligible. The impossible figures illustrated the puzzling relationship between representation and reality. And the tessellated patterns were, it has been said, ‘halfway between chaos and orderliness’; they showed that endless complexity might arise from the application of simple rules.

One day in 1971 Penrose was at a conference in Hoboken, New Jersey. Sitting in the car park afterwards, he wondered aloud to a colleague why he found certain new ideas in quantum mechanics unintelligible. His colleague’s response stuck with Penrose: ‘You resist because the universe isn’t like that.’ It was an epiphany, resolving, as Barss puts it, a long-standing ‘inner debate’ for Penrose: ‘Despite its chaos and hidden secrets, the universe was just what it appeared to be.’ Penrose resolved henceforth to ‘try to understand the universe as it presented itself – as it was’. Despite the mind-boggling banality of this account, it captures something salient both about the way Penrose’s mind works and about 20th-century theoretical physics. Questions about what was intelligible, and what it meant for something to be intelligible, were endemically contested in Penrose’s scientific domain. Penrose wanted solutions to world-puzzles that made sense, that were comprehensible to the human mind, that cohered with accepted bodies of scientific knowledge. For him, intelligibility often meant thinking of physics problems in visual terms, geometry favoured over algebra, diagrams over words. In some of Penrose’s work, you can get a pretty good notion of what’s going on by passing over the words and attending instead to the dozens of hand-drawn diagrams.

Lots of science over the centuries has challenged common notions of the intelligible: the Earth moves; white light is compound; there are such things as atoms. But modern physics is special in this respect: not only does it confront us with a radical mismatch between the way things seem and the way things are; it stages a conflict between everyday and scientific ideas of the relationship between the knower and the known, between different views of what it is to know something. Einstein’s general relativity of 1915 is a geometric theory of gravity understood as a warp in space-time caused by any object with mass. It describes the world of sensible objects – pencils and planets – very well. It is experimentally well confirmed and it is central to modern physics (though many people do find the concept of space-time impossible to grasp). Quantum mechanics, which celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year, describes the subatomic world – protons and photons. It too is experimentally confirmed but, despite the best efforts of physicists to produce a ‘unified field theory’, the fit between relativity and quantum mechanics remains a great unsolved puzzle. Nor are today’s physicists in agreement over the proper way to characterise quantum mechanics: is it, as Sean Carroll puts it, ‘supposed to represent reality, or is it just a tool we use to calculate the probability of experimental outcomes’?

Quantum mechanics radically challenged both common and scientific ways of understanding the world: electrons move from one state to another without passing through an intermediate stage; the act of observing a particle changes what is observed about it; you can know the position of a subatomic particle only as a matter of probability. And there are even more exotic things to be considered. Two particles are said to be ‘entangled’, or correlated, when changes in one influence the properties of the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. Or take the currently fashionable attempt to unify quantum physics and relativity in string theory: treating things such as electrons and photons mathematically as one-dimensional ‘strings’ whose different vibrations yield different ‘particles’. String theory also requires lots of dimensions – eleven is the most common number.

Penrose has no problem visualising, and finding intelligible, the four dimensions of space-time, but many aspects of quantum physics are too much for him. ‘When you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics’ in the macro world, he has said, ‘you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the [mathematical] rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.’ Speaking freely, and setting aside a host of qualifications, Penrose announces that ‘quantum theory is wrong’: ‘It’s not that Einstein was wrong; quantum mechanics is wrong.’ Penrose especially dislikes string theory, finding it neither testable nor falsifiable, with little support apart from the satisfaction of equations. The same weirdness attaches to theories in cosmology – ‘event horizons and information loss in black holes’, ‘multiverses’, ‘the future affecting the past’ – though in this area too theories can be both weird and abundantly confirmed by experiment.

Penrose​ is ‘one of the handful of people I’ve met in my life I would apply the word “genius” to’, one colleague has said. Some go further: Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. From early on, Penrose knew that he was intellectually exceptional, and he understood both the rights and obligations attached to genius. One responsibility was, as Barss puts it, to ‘speak truth to power’, even, and especially, where intellectual power was burnished by fashion and armed by institutional authority. If scientific orthodoxy wasn’t naked, exactly, it was in Penrose’s view badly clothed. His scientific credentials made it possible for him to get away with provocations, and he saw it as his duty to disturb illegitimately settled belief. Who else would do it? Who else could do it?

As he aged, Penrose launched two big heterodox ideas, at some risk to his reputation: one was about cosmic beginnings and ends and the other was about consciousness. The Big Bang, which happened nearly fourteen billion years ago and was the beginning of our universe, was not, in Penrose’s ‘conformal cyclic cosmology’ (CCC), the only beginning. You are permitted to ask what there was before the Big Bang, and Penrose answers that there was an ‘aeon’ before that, and one before that. And the end of our ‘aeon’ will be the beginning of another – a cosmological Ouroboros. ‘There was something before the Big Bang,’ he says, ‘and that something is what we will have in our future.’ There should be empirical evidence for CCC, but it hasn’t yet been found. Many cosmologists are deeply sceptical; some think Penrose has completely lost the plot, and Penrose himself freely acknowledges the apparent ‘craziness’ of the idea. In Barss’s assessment, Penrose remains so attached to CCC because the story is ‘too beautiful, too elegant to be wrong’ – the aesthetics coming first, the conviction of scientific truth following.

CCC may have compromised Penrose’s reputation in cosmology, but his interventions from the 1980s in the great neurological and philosophical debates over consciousness have fared even worse. Tackling the puzzle of consciousness didn’t involve a move from physics to neuroscience; for Penrose, consciousness is a problem in physics. Indeed, the conscious observer has always occupied an uneasily central place in quantum physics. A particle can be in many physical states at the same time: that is, until measurement takes place, when it ‘collapses’ into a single state. It is commonly said that the ‘collapse’ occurs because a conscious observer intervenes in the system. But Penrose sees this account as one of the marks of the incompleteness and inconsistency of quantum physics. Suppose it isn’t consciousness that causes quantum collapse but collapse that causes consciousness. In that case, it wouldn’t be a new psychology that was needed but a new physics. And this is what Penrose has been seeking to supply. Whatever the mechanism of consciousness might be, Penrose is confident that it is not computational: the brain is not a computer and no foreseeable progress in AI will convince him that ‘awareness’ and ‘understanding’ – notions central to his otherwise poorly defined idea of consciousness – are accounted for by conceiving of the brain as an algorithmic machine.

These ideas haven’t gone down well with philosophers or neuroscientists. Penrose’s colleagues in theoretical physics and cosmology aren’t impressed either. Commenting on Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), Hawking said that it was an example of the bad things that can happen when the cobbler doesn’t stick to his last: ‘I get uneasy when people, especially theoretical physicists, talk about consciousness. [Penrose’s] argument seemed to be that consciousness is a mystery and quantum gravity is a mystery so they must be related.’ The New York Times said Penrose’s ‘astonishing’ views would be dismissed out of hand were they trotted out by ‘a thinker of lesser stature’. One distinguished biologist thought that physicists would like the book, as an instance of the way a more fundamental science could deal with puzzles left unsolved by softer sciences, but ‘the people who are going to like the book best … will probably be those who don’t understand it.’ And the philosopher Daniel Dennett speculated that the reason Penrose chose to address a popular audience and not his peers was that neither physicists nor neuroscientists were in a mood to be told that their sciences were built on sand.

At the same time that Penrose was writing his first book about consciousness, Hawking was working on his hugely successful A Brief History of Time (1988). Hawking warned his colleague to go easy on the maths: ‘Every equation you include in your book will halve your sales.’ There was just one equation in A Brief History of Time, but Penrose couldn’t resist, and all of his purportedly popular books are festooned with equations, though he invites innumerate readers to ignore them. But then non-specialists tend to be keener than the experts on weird-sounding Theories of Everything, whether about the cosmos or consciousness. Books like these promise intellectual enlightenment, but what’s more often wanted from them is the dazzle of genius. A Brief History of Time has been called the ‘most unread book of all time’. In 2014 a mathematician devised the ‘Hawking Index’ to assess how far people actually got through a book before returning it to the coffee table. A Brief History of Time – nine million copies sold – had an index of 6.6 per cent, beaten only in the original sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 pages long and a documentary about Hawking with the same title was produced by Errol Morris in 1991; Penrose’s Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, from 2004, weighs in at 1136 pages – and there are no current plans for a movie.)

The American podcaster Joe Rogan is a libertarian, Covid sceptic and conspiracy theorist, with 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 19.9 million on YouTube, an audience heavily skewed to excitable young men. Just before the 2024 US presidential election, Rogan put out a supine three-hour interview with Donald Trump, who delivered his usual portion of lies, idiocies and bluster. Six years earlier, one of Rogan’s guests had been Penrose. The tweedily attired scientist didn’t patronise and the sweatshirted interviewer was duly star-struck: ‘I’m a big fan of your work.’ Rogan reckoned his audience would be eager to hear that consciousness was something special, more than mechanical, maybe even mysterious – and the uptake on the internet indicated he was right. Penrose wanted a non-specialist audience. He increasingly felt that his disciplinary colleagues were glued fast to unsustainable orthodoxies: quantum theory needed urgent repair; string theory was absurd; cosmological origin accounts were wrong; computational theories of consciousness were unsustainable. Non-specialists didn’t know very much, but they had open minds: with proper instruction, they could be brought to see the emperor’s nakedness.

Rogan put his finger on the matter when he suggested to a bemused Penrose that non-computational theories of the brain and of consciousness were ‘very susceptible to woo, right? … People want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness.’ Penrose styles himself as an agnostic, but some features of his cosmological thinking fascinated the religious and the mystically minded – endless cycles of beginnings and ends; talk about cosmological meaning. In the film A Brief History of Time, Penrose declares that ‘the universe has a purpose; it’s not somehow just there by chance … There is something much deeper about it.’ He finds it ‘a plausible picture that after you die you could be somebody else, somebody that lived in the past, not in the future’. For Penrose, these are sentiments within science, and he seems slightly puzzled by the enthusiasm of Christians, Buddhists and the assorted ‘woo’.

There were also some well-heeled patrons who were drawn to the audacity, heterodoxy and scope of Penrose’s thinking. James Tagg, a tech entrepreneur, wanted to found a Penrose Institute in San Diego to pursue the consciousness theories. Penrose went along with the plan and Tagg set about fundraising. At a meeting of consciousness aficionados in 2017, Penrose was told there was someone who wanted to talk to him who might be willing to put big money into the institute. This turned out to be Jeffrey Epstein, who had for some time financed initiatives in physics as well as in mind and brain research. ‘I was sitting there talking to Jeffrey Epstein and he was asking me about this institute,’ Penrose told Barss. ‘Now I didn’t really know anything about him. He said he had these parties. He was wondering whether I’d be interested to go to New York. He could invite Woody Allen.’ Penrose’s colleagues told him that Epstein was a convicted sex offender; Penrose recommended to Epstein that he support a colleague of his, a female physicist, but decided to skip the party.

We​ are in two minds when it comes to how genius should behave. On the one hand we want the genius to be modest, gracious, saint-like – a sort of intellectual noblesse oblige, perhaps, or a remnant of the past association of genius with the divine. Think of Darwin or Einstein. On the other hand, genius may be granted more than the usual quantum of self-regard. When you are conscious that you see further and know better, when you take on the ‘awesome responsibility’ of proclaiming what your genius has revealed, you can become egotistical and troublesome. Think of Galileo or Newton. Penrose is a mixture of the two modes. Humility is evident in his generosity with his time, his care for his students, his deflationary speaking manner. But there is vanity too, and he has, from time to time, insisted on getting what he feels is properly owed to him – intellectually and materially.

Penrose and Hawking are the two physicists who have done the most to shape our present-day understanding of black holes – collapsed stars of such extreme density that not even light can escape them. When, in a talk at Cambridge in 1965, Penrose laid out his theories about singularities – points at which space-time and the laws of physics do not apply – at the heart of black holes, the 23-year-old Hawking was in the audience. The two formed an instant bond, and the younger man quickly took up Penrose’s ideas; the Penrose singularity theorem soon became known as the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems. Hawking died in 2018, and now the shared credit rankles Penrose. ‘I had the theorem first,’ he told Barss. ‘Stephen generalised it and applied it to different situations’; ‘The general techniques came from me. [Hawking] developed them.’ Wracked by motor neurone disease, Hawking became, in Barss’s words, ‘an icon of the triumph of the mind over the body’. It’s impossible to imagine that Penrose envied Hawking’s suffering, but he did resent the way Hawking’s ethereal body contributed to his celebrity, casting colleagues into the shade.

One Penrose production that did break through was his tessellated tiling. You can now buy Penrose floor tiles and wallpaper; you can have your sofa upholstered and your duvet covered in Penrose tile fabric; and, naturally, there are Penrose tile jigsaw puzzles. In the mid-1970s, alive to such possibilities, Penrose obtained patent protection for the tiling designs, and entered into an agreement with a company called Pentaplex to commercialise them. But then one day Penrose’s wife went shopping in an Oxford supermarket and brought home rolls of toilet paper embossed with what appeared to be Penrose tile designs. (Tile-embossed paper was supposed to feel softer and the sheets had less tendency to stick together on the roll.) The professor was miffed: he and Pentaplex sued Kimberly-Clark, the manufacturer of the loo rolls. ‘When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission,’ the director of Pentaplex said, ‘then a last stand must be made.’ The case was eventually settled out of court and the loo paper withdrawn; four rolls of it are now lodged at the Science Museum in South Kensington to commemorate the dispute.

The Impossible Man addresses both the life and the life of the mind, and assumes that the first informs the second. One of the ways it does this is unconvincing. As a boy, Penrose was socially awkward; he puzzled over the immensity of the universe, and whether he had free will or if things just happened to him; he was drawn to mathematics as the key to reality. However, there have been many boys just like that; few have become eminent theoretical physicists, and only one became the Oxford professor of mathematics who won the Nobel Prize for his work on black holes. There’s something to be said about whatever might be meant by natural gifts; and there’s something to be said about family influences. But in linking the life with the life of the mind, often too little is made of the subject’s passage through knowledge institutions; the meeting with other minds in particular institutional spaces; the accidents of people met, books read and conversations had; and the paths taken through landscapes of opportunity and risk. Such things may not make for a coherent story, but how reasonable is it to require that a specific life-course conform to a coherent narrative?

A more plausible story connecting the life and the life of the mind is told by Penrose himself. His dealings with colleagues were, on the whole, smooth, but his intimate relationships with women were not. As a young man, he said, ‘I was terribly shy with women … I never really got to know any woman closely.’ He appreciated that there was a deliberate choice to be made between intimate relationships and a mathematical life, and it was maths that had the greater appeal: ‘By pouring my life into my mathematics … I was able to find release for those psychic energies, which would otherwise have found outlet in more normal pursuits.’ So, when he met Joan Wedge, the American woman who became his first wife, he found himself ‘more susceptible than I should have been’. They had three sons, and the marriage lasted twenty years, but as he told Barss, ‘It was a great mistake.’ Aged 26, he had never ‘had a sexual relationship with anybody’; ‘She kind of made a beeline for me.’ Barss sums up what Penrose wanted him to understand: ‘Surely she had taken calculated advantage of his naivety and tricked him into this unhappy marriage.’

Joan was depressive. Penrose thought that his razor-sharp rationality and increasingly successful career ought to make her happy, yet they didn’t. In their North London home, Penrose installed a trapdoor leading from the living room to a study below; when he descended through the trapdoor, he moved from the puzzles he could not figure out to the ones he could. He learned to discount both his own misery and his wife’s, Barss writes, ‘as cosmologically inconsequential … He fled deeper and deeper into that orderly mathematical world, whose beauty made his everyday life with Joan seem all the uglier.’ He ‘adamantly refused to let her unhappiness distract him’. Cosmological theory required his undivided attention. He did what he felt he could as husband and father, but that wasn’t much; disappearing through the trapdoor was the duty he owed to his genius.

The bad marriage took its toll on the boys. Now middle-aged, they were reluctant to have anything to do with the book, but Barss did finally make contact with two of the sons. One of them, reflecting on the psychological problems that had plagued him throughout his life, thought they could be traced back to witnessing Penrose’s aggressive behaviour towards Joan. Penrose thinks it possible he might have been at fault: ‘I do remember an occasion when I actually picked her up and threw her on the bed. There may have been occasions when there was no other choice. I wouldn’t say I was a saint. Certainly not. She was attacking me all the time – verbally I mean.’ The sons seemed willing to reconcile, but Penrose wasn’t interested: ‘I feel my life is busy enough, and if I get involved with them, it just distracts from other things.’

The marriage to Joan ended in 1980 – she died in 2019 – but other relationships followed. His most intense involvement, seemingly unrequited but apparently the love of his life, was with Judith Daniels, a mathematics undergraduate thirteen years younger. He pursued her for years, and they exchanged hundreds of letters. Joan hadn’t been educated in science, but Judith had. Penrose hoped she would be able to understand his cosmological and mathematical ideas, and seized on a conception of what their relationship could be. Judith would be his ‘muse’, a vital spark to his creativity. She tried to oblige, but was unsure she was competent to follow where Penrose was going. When, finally, she rejected him, Penrose was distraught, writing to her: ‘It was you … who had kindled a fire in me … That I could interest you with what I wrote – that meant everything to me.’ He then tried to replicate her role with other women: ‘Without a muse’, Barss writes, Penrose ‘mistrusted his ability to remain creative. He yearned for … another Judith, to inspire and appreciate him.’ There were several candidates, each scientifically literate, each much younger than him. When Penrose told Ivette Fuentes – a highly talented Mexican theoretical physicist, thirty years younger – that she was his muse, she was furious: ‘Don’t you ever, ever talk like that about me … I don’t want to be your muse.’

Penrose married a second time when he was in his mid-fifties. Vanessa Thomas was a 21-year-old Oxford mathematics student whom Penrose was supervising and who gave up her doctoral studies when their relationship became public. They had a child, and shared a strong interest in puzzles. He saw her as a muse, too, but this particular muse was at odds with her husband about his increasing involvement with scientific heterodoxy, worried about the damage it was doing to his reputation. She thought the Rogan interview was a mistake, and said so, but Penrose didn’t view criticism as appropriate in a muse: ‘He no longer cared if his ideas made no sense to her,’ Barss writes, ‘and she all but gave up on hearing him out.’ It seemed to Penrose that Vanessa thought his ideas about cyclical cosmologies and consciousness were ‘crackpot’, and that he was getting mixed up with dodgy people, but he was not swayed. Vanessa moved out of their house in Oxford and the marriage ended.

Everybody has a life; not everybody lives the life of the mind. A couple sets up house together: dinners get made, bills get paid and, if there are children, they get looked after. But when one of the couple is recognised as a genius, there’s often a waiver available. Then it’s the other person who takes the bins out and does the emotional labour, and the genius might think that time spent doing that sort of thing is time wasted. After all, it’s only they who can figure out the nature of the cosmos; ordinary people can do the ordinary things. The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people.