The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe is a book on modern physics by the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, published in 2004.

The Road to Reality reverses this process, first expounding the underlying mathematics of space–time, then showing how electromagnetism and other phenomena fall out fully formed.

The final chapters reflect Penrose's personal perspective, which differs in some respects from what he regards as the current fashion among theoretical physicists.

If you compare Penrose’s work to any of the recent ones ... then you will understand a reviewer’s inclination to hold The Road to Reality up to the highest standards, for it is, indeed, sui generis.

For anybody who wants to learn up-to-date physics at a level between standard popularization and graduate text, The Road to Reality is the only book in town.

He reminds us of an earlier era before physicists learned to aggressively hype their ideas, an era in which the prevailing ethic called for honestly explaining the pros and cons and letting the ideas and results speak for themselves.At the core of Penrose’s thinking are arguments that lead him to believe that quantum mechanics must be modified to be unified with gravity.

The worst parts of the book are the chapters on high-energy physics and quantum field theory, which in spite of their brevity contain several serious blunders: The Cabibbo angle does not govern the mixing of K0 and K0 mesons to make the long- and short-lived Ks.