Patchen Barss's Blog

New studies of the ‘platypus of materials’ help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, patterns.

The post Quasicrystals Spill Secrets of Their Formation appeared first on Patchen Barss.

By Steven Shapin 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…

The post Through the Trapdoor appeared first on Patchen Barss.

Patchen Barss on his 3 greatest revelations while writing The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius. “Long before I began work on The Impossible Man in 2018, I thought of Roger Penrose as a man at the center of two entirely separate mythologies: one as a mathematical physicist who decoded the inner workings […]

The post When Work is Play appeared first on Patchen Barss.

An interview with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies on her excellent podcast, Biographers in Conversation. Gabriella asked insightful questions about the choices I made writing The Impossible Man, and about what makes a life sufficiently unusual to make a biography worth writing, and sufficiently universal to make it worth reading.

The post Biographers in Conversation appeared first on Patchen Barss.

I joined physicist Emily Petroff at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics for a conversation about mathematics, cosmology, and mortality, and about the strange ways that seemingly intractable problems can suddenly reveal simple, beautiful solutions.

The post Unexpected Simplicity appeared first on Patchen Barss.

“Barss captures the mathematician – still working at age 93 – in his own, real world, and shows that while maths may well have an independent existence from the physical universe, it is practised by people. People with families, frustrations, triumphs and tragedies. And he does it brilliantly.”

The post The genius physicist whose work was inspired by Escher appeared first on Patchen Barss.

By Jenann T. Ismael, Times Literary Supplement “Barss is good at conveying his subject’s very particular talents: the geometric imagination, the scope and beauty of the work, and the almost magical ability to turn what seems to be an impossible problem into something simple and directly visualizeable.”

The post Solving the big puzzles appeared first on Patchen Barss.

By Graham Farmelo, Science “Roger Penrose emerges from this accomplished biography as an even more complex and fascinating person than many of his colleagues believe him to be. The book is a compelling argument against the common view about biographies of scientists, once held by Stephen Hawking: “the lives of scientists interest no one—only their […]

The post Becoming Roger Penrose appeared first on Patchen Barss.

“In this elegant biography, Barss vividly evokes Penrose’s geometric sensibility and his quest to prove that a geometrically perfect world lies hidden behind everyday reality.”

The post Briefly noted appeared first on Patchen Barss.

“In this elegant biography, Barss vividly evokes Penrose’s geometric sensibility and his quest to prove that a geometrically perfect world lies hidden behind everyday reality.” Read the full review

The post Briefly noted in the New Yorker appeared first on Patchen Barss.