From one of our greatest living scientists, a magnificent book that provides, for the serious lay reader, the most comprehensive and sophisticated account we have yet had of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory.

Since the earliest efforts of the ancient Greeks to find order amid the chaos around us, there has been continual accelerated progress toward understanding the laws that govern our universe. And the particularly important advances made by means of the revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics have deeply altered our vision of the cosmos and provided us with models of unprecedented accuracy.

What Roger Penrose so brilliantly accomplishes in this book is threefold. First, he gives us an overall narrative description of our present understanding of the universe and its physical behaviors–from the unseeable, minuscule movement of the subatomic particle to the journeys of the planets and the stars in the vastness of time and space.

Second, he evokes the extraordinary beauty that lies in the mysterious and profound relationships between these physical behaviors and the subtle mathematical ideas that explain and interpret them.

Third, Penrose comes to the arresting conclusion–as he explores the compatibility of the two grand classic theories of modern physics–that Einstein’s general theory of relativity stands firm while quantum theory, as presently constituted, still needs refashioning.

Along the way, he talks about a wealth of issues, controversies, and phenomena; about the roles of various kinds of numbers in physics, ideas of calculus and modern geometry, visions of infinity, the big bang, black holes, the profound challenge of the second law of thermodynamics, string and M theory, loop quantum gravity, twistors, and educated guesses about science in the near future. In The Road to Reality he has given us a work of enormous scope, intention, and achievement–a complete and essential work of science

從古希臘人探尋我們身邊的秩序與混沌的最早期的努力開始，人們對支配著我們生活的宇宙的法則的理解也在不斷加速。而通過相對論與量子力學這樣的革命性理論而取得的重要進展，已經深刻地改變瞭我們觀察宇宙的視野。在這本書中，作者Roger Penrose首先對我們目前對宇宙的理解給齣一個全麵的概述，從我們看不到的亞原子粒子的微小運動到漫天星鬥的運行。在物質的世界與用以解釋和描述它們的微妙的數理概念之間存在一種關係，揭示這一關係中所呈現的美是作者接下來要做的事。在此基礎上，作者又進而對現有的理論加以思考。依著這一思路，他在此書討論瞭大量的問題、爭論以及現象，不僅是前麵提到的相對論，還包括正誘惑著科學傢們智慧的膜理論等。作者彭羅斯早已為中國讀者所熟悉，他曾於1988年與霍金共同分享當年授予物理學傢的沃爾夫奬。他的作品《皇帝新腦》、《時空本性》（與霍金閤著）此前曾在我國翻譯齣版。來自《星期天泰晤士報》的評論說，彭羅斯的書揭示瞭糾結在自然與人類想像力之間的美與精妙之處。

Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their joint contribution to our understanding of the universe. His books include The Emperor’s New Mind, Shadows of the Mind, and The Nature of Space and Time, which he wrote with Hawking. He has lectured extensively at universities throughout America. He lives in Oxford.