i got to hear sir roger penrose talk about his new book the road to reality. (review)
penrose has this knack of dropping mind bombs with a couple short sentences (that is, if you know some physics). he spent some time (both in the book and the lecture) to comment on some of the theories du jour, from quantum gravity to superstrings.
i especially liked his objection to how thermalization is used to make the case for inflation. arguing with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, there is a 10^10^123 likelihood for the initial state of the universe (basically, it requires very very low entropy while singularities have very high entropy). yet inflation has happened, so what gives? surprisingly, this kind of reasoning hasn’t been used for inflationary cosmology…
i am sure there were lots of other references like that, but my physics were not nearly strong enough to understand what he talked about 🙂

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