Science Quote by Roger Penrose

Penrose is warning you about the quiet geometry of drift: the way a handful of “little things” - minor assumptions, casual choices of notation, a preference for one kind of explanation over another - can, through accumulation, bend your intellectual trajectory until you’re inhabiting a different map than everyone else. The line works because it refuses the heroic myth of the lone genius having a single lightning-bolt insight. Instead, it’s about compounding: small deviations that seem negligible locally but become massive globally, like a geodesic that starts almost parallel and ends up on the far side of the manifold.

The subtext is a defense of eccentricity without romanticizing it. “May not seem like much” acknowledges how easy it is for peers to dismiss early oddities as pedantry or distraction. “After a while” signals timescale and patience: real divergence isn’t dramatic; it’s slow. Then comes the sting: “a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.” That’s not just distance, it’s misalignment. You can be brilliant and still become unintelligible, stranded in a private framework where your results don’t connect to the questions the field currently cares about.

Context matters here: Penrose’s career lives at the edge where physics, cosmology, and pure mathematics blur, and his most controversial positions (on consciousness, on certain cosmological ideas) have often hinged on precisely those “little things” - foundational commitments about computation, reality, or symmetry. He’s describing the cost and the power of taking fundamentals seriously: it can open a new path, or quietly exile you from the conversation.