Other Is The Road to Reality by Penrose a Good Buy for a Beginner?

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    Penrose Reality
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"The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose is considered challenging for beginners, especially those with limited mathematical knowledge. While it offers intuitive insights into complex mathematical concepts, it requires a solid understanding of high school math to fully grasp its content. Readers familiar with other popular science books may find it significantly different in depth and complexity. Although it's not impossible for a layman to read, achieving true understanding may be unrealistic without prior familiarity with the material. Overall, it may be beneficial to skim the book first to assess personal comprehension before committing to a full read.
iosman001
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Hello,

i live in the US and decided to get this book off of amazon i was wondering if anyone has read, or atleast skimmed (its pretty big) through it and would mind telling me if its a good buy(although if it isnt, its a little late now :-p).

also, I am pretty new to most of the theories. all of my knowledge has come from "A Brief History of Time", "The Elegant Universe", "The Universe in a Nutshell", and "Hyperspace". Do you think i could plow my way through this book or would it be way over my head?

thanks
alexsunny
 
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Hmmm, I haven't read it but I have skimmed it. It's a tough book for a layman with little knowledge. It is much different from the other books you mentioned. What is the level of your math knowledge and familiarity? If you don't remember at least high school math it may be very rough. It has like, what, almost 400 pages of math? It is interesting math, not boring math, and it is approached on an intuitive level rather than getting deep into technicalities, but I would say you need some familiarity and facility with basic math to be able to get through all that stuff. I would say skim it and see for yourself. It's definitely not impossible or whatever but you'd have to set finishing the book as a target.
 
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This book's been discussed here just recently
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/anyone-read-road-to-reality.1000552/

You could go ahead and read it, of course, but actually understanding it for a layman, who doesn't already have familiarity with mathematical content of this book, is pretty unrealistic in my opinion.
 
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It's also not really a textbook.
 
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thanks my issue has been fixed.
 
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I've gone through the Standard turbulence textbooks such as Pope's Turbulent Flows and Wilcox' Turbulent modelling for CFD which mostly Covers RANS and the closure models. I want to jump more into DNS but most of the work i've been able to come across is too "practical" and not much explanation of the theory behind it. I wonder if there is a book that takes a theoretical approach to Turbulence starting from the full Navier Stokes Equations and developing from there, instead of jumping from...

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