The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose is concerned with answering the question of whether artificial intelligence is infact possible. Are our minds capable of being modeled by an algorithm or is there something far more complicated going on?

In a quest to answer this question Mr Penrose covers a variety of subjects ranging from turing machines to general relativity and quantum physics. While most (if not all) of the material is looked at in terms of computability, I found this did not distract from giving a good overview of each field.

Definitely a worthwhile read and a very good introduction to modern physics. However, it is not light reading and can get quite complicated in places.

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For science fiction based on quantum physics: Greg Egan’s Quarantine.