The Road to Reality Study Notes

Each week The Road to Reality Book Club tackles a chapter of Sir Roger Penrose's Epic Tome. We use these meetings as an opportunity to write down the major points to be taken from our reading. Here we attempt to sum up what we believe Penrose was trying to convey and why. The hope is that these community-generated reading notes will benefit people in the future as they go on the same journey.

Chapter 2 An ancient theorem and a modern question

• summary

Chapter 3 Kinds of number in the physical world

• and so on

Chapter 4 Magical Complex Numbers

Penrose introduced the complex numbers, extending addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of the reals to the system obtained by adjoining i, the square root of -1. Polynomial equations can be solved by complex numbers, this property is called algebraic closure and follows from the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.

Complex numbers can be visualized graphically as a plane, where the horizontal coordinate gives the real coordinate of the number and the vertical coordinate gives the imaginary part. This helps understand the behavior of power series; for example, the power series $$1-x^2+x^4+\cdots$$ converges to the function $$1/(1+x²)$$ only when $$|x|<1$$, despite the fact that the function doesn't seem to have "singular" behavior anywhere on the real line. This is explained by singularities at $$x=i,-i$$.

Finally, the Mandelbrot set is defined as the set of all points $$c$$ in the complex plane so that repeated applications of the transformation mapping $$z$$ to $$z^2+c$$, starting with $$z=0$$, do not escape to infinity.

Chapter 5 Geometry of logarithms, powers, and roots

This is a first pass of main topics in this chapter. This should be expanded.

5.1 Geometry of complex algebra

What addition and multiplication look like geometrically on a complex plane.

• law of addition
• law of multiplication
• addition map
• multiplication map
  • what does multiply by i do? rotate

5.2 The idea of the complex logarithm

Relation between addition and multiplication when introducing exponents.

• $$b^{m+n} = b^m \times b^n$$

5.3 Multiple valuedness, natural logarithms

Different values can arrive at the same value. Rotation brings you back to the same place repeatedly.

• $$e^{i\theta}$$ is helpful notation for understanding rotating
• $$e^{i\theta} = cos \theta + i sin \theta$$
• (Worth looking into Taylor Series, which is related.)

Chapter 6 Real-number calculus

6.1 What makes an honest function?

• Differentiable, Analytic

6.2 Slopes of functions

• Derivative is the slope of the tangent line
• Finding the slope of the tangent line for every point

6.3 Higher derivatives; $$C^\infty$$-smooth functions

• Second derivatives
• Euler would require you to have functions that are $$C^\infty$$-smooth
• Not everything that is $$C^\infty$$-smooth is ok for Euler

6.4 The "Eulerian" notion of a function?

• Physics in trying to understand reality by approximating it.

6.5 The rules of differentiation

• Armed with these few rules (and loads and loads of practice), one can become an "expert at differentiation" without needing to hae much in the way of actual understanding of why the rules work!

Other Resources

• The Portal Book Club - We have a weekly group that meets to talk about this book. Come join us in Discord!
• Chronological guide to concepts introduced in TRTR Google Doc
• Book Club Resources in Google Drive