In his 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose commented on the limitations on human knowledge with a striking example: He conjectured that we would most likely never know whether a string of 10 consecutive 7s appears in the digital expansion of the number pi.

By Kasturirangan, Rajesh In recent years, consciousness has reemerged from the nether world of scientific and philosophical investigation and is now seen by many researchers as the last great unsolved scientific problem.

By Fredric Koeppel / koeppel@commercialappealcom The greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th Century are largely incomprehensible to the billions of people who lack PhDs in theoretical physics or microbiology.

In this, the centenary of Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect, the author discusses possible linkages between nonlinear paradigms developed to understand meteorological predictability and the deepest conceptual problems of quantum theory.

When I noticed that there are roughly as many pages in the latest blockbuster from Roger Penrose as the number of words allocated for my review, I was tempted to give each page a single-word comment.