Roger Penrose’s newly published The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe is a rigorous and exhaustive map to the “theory of nearly everything.”

Among his controversial ideas: Penrose proposes that the missing link between macroscopic and submicroscopic is gravity. Aggregations of particles exist in their blurry quantum mechanical states until so many particles are both here and there that space-time itself — which is warped by the presence of matter and therefore is warped in multiple simultaneous ways by matter that is both here and there — ultimately can no longer support so much indeterminacy.