Patchen Barss

Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist and author. He was the 2021-2022 Sloan Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and has written and edited for Scientific American, BBC Future, Nautilus Magazine, as well as many other outlets. He has also worked as a museum consultant, television and radio producer, and as a strategic communications consultant.

The Impossible Man

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. 

Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man, success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him.

Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one.

(Basic Books, November 2024)