The Road to Reality

I'm now about a third of the way through Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and I'm not finding it easy going. Despite suffering from a severe case of statistician's disease I was once a competent enough mathematician and I reckon a 2(i) in the subject from Durham probably puts me in the extreme tail of any distribution of mathematical ability/knowledge compared to the general population. Yet the blurb on the book claims it was a best seller and it still has a respectable sales rank of 567 on amazon.co.uk (contrasting with a sales rank of 370,000+ on amazon.com). So who is buying this book, how far are they getting through it and why? I'm quite curious.

Mostly to form so far

Everyone has now played two games in the World Cup and there have been few real upsets so far.

8 teams have already qualified for the KO stage; 5 are from the EU and 3 from South America. 3 speak Spanish, 2 Portugese and 3 West Germanic languages!

7 teams have been eliminated. No obvious pattern here but Togo and Ivory Coast are among the fallen. As France and Tunisia, the remaining francophones, are hanging on by their finger nails it could be a very poor world cup for French speakers.

So 17 teams will now be competing for the remaining 8 KO stage places, in most cases via complex calculations rather than head to head battles. The best chances for a major upset are in group B where Trinidad must beat Paraguay and England beat Sweden (and various conditions relating to margin of victory and goals scored must be met) for Trinidad to pip Sweden for a place. The other possible upset is in Group H where France must beat Togo by at least two goals to be sure of a place in the KO.