In The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Sir Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, unfolds his theory of the evolution of the Cosmos on the reasonable assumptions that Nature is functionally one and that natural systems are consequently historically and energetically related through their common substrate. His argument unfolds in three main stages, as the title of the book suggests. The main argument has already been presented to the educated public in two important books: (...) first in The Emperor’s New Mind, published in 1989, and later in Shadows of the Mind, published in 1994 partly to refute the counter-arguments leveled against his thesis about the human mind, a thesis which irked a large number of people whose assumptions were being challenged. (shrink)