Roger Penrose
Author of The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
About the Author
Born in England, the son of a geneticist, Roger Penrose received a Ph.D. in 1957 from Cambridge University. Penrose then became a professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in 1966 and a Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University in 1973. Penrose, a mathematician and show more theoretical physicist, has done much to elucidate the fundamental properties of black holes. With Stephen Hawking, Penrose proved a theorem of Albert Einstein's general relativity, asserting that at the center of a black hole there must evolve a "space-time singularity" of zero volume and infinite density, in which the current laws of physics do not apply. He also proposed the hypothesis of "cosmic censorship," which claims that such singularities must possess an event horizon. In 1969 Penrose described a process for the extraction of energy from a black hole, as well as how rotational energy of the black hole is transferred to a particle outside the hole. In addition, Penrose has done much to develop the mathematics needed to unite general relativity, which deals with the gravitational interactions of matter, and quantum mechanics, which describes all other interactions. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Roger Penrose at Festival della Scienza Oct 29 2011
Series
Works by Roger Penrose
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989) 3,440 copies, 29 reviews
Consciousness and the Universe: Quantum Physics, Evolution, Brain & Mind (2011) — Editor — 33 copies
Cuestiones cuanticas y cosmologicas / Quantum and Cosmologic questions (Spanish Edition) (1995) 9 copies
Spinors and Space-Time 4 copies
I BUCHI NERI 3 copies
Kralın Yeni Usu 2: Fiziğin gizemi 2 copies
Dal Big Bang all'Eternità 1 copy
Space-time and Cosmology 1 copy
Relativity 1 copy
Associated Works
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, And Space-Time (1963) 1,730 copies, 10 reviews
What Is Life? : With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (1992) — Foreword, some editions — 974 copies, 12 reviews
Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (1963) — Introduction, some editions — 414 copies, 1 review
'Nature and the Greeks' and 'Science and Humanism' (Canto original series) (1996) — Foreword, some editions — 104 copies
The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics (2002) — Contributor — 57 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Penrose, Roger
- Birthdate
- 1931-08-08
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University College London (BSc ∙ 1952)
University of Cambridge (St. John's College ∙ Ph.D ∙ Mathematics | 1958) - Occupations
- mathematician
philosopher of science
theoretical physicist
professor - Organizations
- University of Oxford
Birkbeck College, University of London
King's College, University of London
Bedford College, University of London
International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation
British Humanist Association - Awards and honors
- Order of Merit (2000)
Royal Society (Fellow, 1972)
Nobel Prize (Physics, 2020)
Copley Medal (2008)
De Morgan Medal (2004)
Knight Bachelor (1994) (show all 22)
Royal Society Royal Medal (1985)
Albert Einstein Medal (1990)
Naylor Prize (1991)
Wolf Prize (1988)
Dannie Heineman Prize (1971)
Fonseca Prize (2011)
Richard R. Ernst Medal (2012)
Institute of Physics (Honorary Fellow, 1989)
Eddington Medal (1975)
Paul Dirac Medal and Prize (1989)
Polish Academy of Sciences (1994)
United States National Academy of Sciences (Foreign Associate, 1998)
Australian Institute of Physics Dirac Medal (2005)
American Philosophical Society (International Member, 2011)
Commandino Medal (2017)
James Scott Prize Lectureship (1997-2000) - Relationships
- Penrose, Lionel S. (father)
Penrose, Roland (uncle)
Rindler, Wolfgang (colleague)
Penrose, J. Doyle (grandfather)
Leathes, John Beresford (grandfather)
Penrose, Oliver (brother) (show all 9)
Hodgson, Shirley (sister)
Penrose, Jonathan (brother)
Newman, Max (step-father) - Short biography
- Sir Roger Penrose has been producing original and important scientific ideas for half a century, having earned his Ph.D. from St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1957. His work is characterized by exceptional geometrical and physical insight. He applied new mathematical techniques to Einstein's general relativity and led the renaissance in gravitation theory in the 1960s. His novel ideas on space and time and his concept of "twistors" are increasingly influential. This remarkable mathematical theory combining algebraic and geometrical methods has been one of his major breakthroughs. Even his recreations have had intellectual impact: for instance, his studies of the "impossible figures" in Escher's artwork, and the never-repeating patterns of "Penrose tiling." He has influenced and stimulated a wide public through his lectures and his best-selling and wide-ranging books, including: Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity, 1972; (with W. Rindler) Spinors and Space-Time, Vol. 1, 1984, Vol. 2, 1986; The Emperor's New Mind, 1989; Shadows of the Mind, 1996; Collected Works (six volumes), 2010. He has won a number of awards, including the W. H. Heinemann Prize (1971), the Science Book Prize (1990), Order of Merit (1994), the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society (2004) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2008), and belongs to a number of academic societies, including the Royal Society, the Royal Irish Academy, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences (1998). Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Colchester, Essex, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Colchester, Essex, England, UK
London, England, UK
Cambridge, England, UK
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK - Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
TheEmperor's New Mind Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics by Penrose, Roger ( Author ) ON Mar-04-1999, Paperback by Roger Penrose
Penrose certainly has a generous idea of his readers' mathematical ability. It's a kind of running joke among Penrose-fans: he always starts his books by saying you'll find it tough going if you haven't got a 12th Year (in Portugal)/GCSE (in the UK) in math, but that he'll explain it as he goes if you haven't. Twenty pages later you're on Gödel and conformable geometry. He doesn't do it deliberately; he really does believe his books are popular science. How can you not love him? I purchased show more an on-line kindle edition of this book back last year via Amazon and it was more about bringing myself up to date (I read it for the first time in 1991 when the book came out), although such things are never truly current due to Theories being debated and tested for very many years within Scientific Realms. Roger Penrose's books are as stated often inclusive of more mathematical devises than many books aimed at more laymen realms, so I often regard them as perhaps Bridging that gap between Solid Science Headaches and Laymen 'I read an article and am a common law know-all expert'. What to say about this re-read? What I liked within this particular tomb over multiple other works and writers from his genre was that Penrose took the opportunity to use more analogy & metaphor in his descriptions of the function of the ideas. So, you read the math and then you might see an image or descriptive wording of the comparisons. Overall as I have stated above, this is potentially overwhelming for your Mr/s-Average-Layman and Not-Hard-Core-Enough-for-Scientists. Though for anyone looking for a kind of Half-Way-House bridging zone, this book may well serve and be fit for the purpose.
Anyone read Raymond Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near"? It discusses this exact same stuff in more detail. Personally, I think it's a little more optimistic about strong AI than reality warrants. Penrose has interesting ideas about quantum consciousness, but I don't see humanity making any major gains on "the hard problem of consciousness" any time soon. It's like the holy grail of several disciplines. In reading about an electromagnetic theory of consciousness, a good point was brought up - if the brain develops its own field, then contemporary traditional computer engineering will never achieve the goal of true AI, simply because now actively creating shielding against short-circuits won't allow any field to develop. The closest I've seen to understanding consciousness seems to be the promising ideas about quantum theories of consciousness. We have yet to develop computers that can grow their own neural connections, much less create consciousness. It's been proven that memory doesn't reside in any one neuron - you can't create a lesion which excises a given memory, for instance. There's got to be some kind of unknown field. Until we understand the toughest riddle of all - consciousness - we will never develop true AI. Nor, I might add, will we be able to do what Kurzweil suggests - "uploading the mind". Bullshit. The day we can achieve either of those things we will also be able to create the ability to travel at the speed of light, but transmitting our consciousness, with perhaps genetic meta-data to reconstruct the body nanoscopically at the other end. It's the stuff of SF, to be sure.
One only has to refer to Alan Turing's famous "Can Machine's Think?" to understand the singularity is total nonsense. Machines, hardware are nothing w/o a program to function it, which is nothing more than a theory. When one compares the structure of our ability to speak (our language) with that of programming, it's not even close to being in the same field of discussion. Programming languages follow a somewhat commonsensical pattern, because we're the ones manipulating it. When one looks at the core structure of our language, it's so remote from common sense notions that it is not for the ear, but more soothing for the mind. It's striking the deeper we look into out cognitive faculties, the more it diverts from our presumptions. Man's fascination with machines and their impact began to fully realize itself with Galileo and Descartes, only to get smothered rather abruptly forever (apparently not) by Newton not too long after. We should pay much more attention to history, most certainly politically but scientifically as well.
NB: It's worth pointing out that towards the end of his life Hawking gained an interest in what is known as model dependent reality...which actually totally negates any notion of a "theory of everything". So, Hawking's book "The Grand Design" actually contradicts the very idea that a theory of everything is even possible. Hawking also worked with Professor Paul Davies on ideas about reverse causality....a very fringe and not widely accepted area of speculation. All of which shows he was open to new ideas. show less
Anyone read Raymond Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near"? It discusses this exact same stuff in more detail. Personally, I think it's a little more optimistic about strong AI than reality warrants. Penrose has interesting ideas about quantum consciousness, but I don't see humanity making any major gains on "the hard problem of consciousness" any time soon. It's like the holy grail of several disciplines. In reading about an electromagnetic theory of consciousness, a good point was brought up - if the brain develops its own field, then contemporary traditional computer engineering will never achieve the goal of true AI, simply because now actively creating shielding against short-circuits won't allow any field to develop. The closest I've seen to understanding consciousness seems to be the promising ideas about quantum theories of consciousness. We have yet to develop computers that can grow their own neural connections, much less create consciousness. It's been proven that memory doesn't reside in any one neuron - you can't create a lesion which excises a given memory, for instance. There's got to be some kind of unknown field. Until we understand the toughest riddle of all - consciousness - we will never develop true AI. Nor, I might add, will we be able to do what Kurzweil suggests - "uploading the mind". Bullshit. The day we can achieve either of those things we will also be able to create the ability to travel at the speed of light, but transmitting our consciousness, with perhaps genetic meta-data to reconstruct the body nanoscopically at the other end. It's the stuff of SF, to be sure.
One only has to refer to Alan Turing's famous "Can Machine's Think?" to understand the singularity is total nonsense. Machines, hardware are nothing w/o a program to function it, which is nothing more than a theory. When one compares the structure of our ability to speak (our language) with that of programming, it's not even close to being in the same field of discussion. Programming languages follow a somewhat commonsensical pattern, because we're the ones manipulating it. When one looks at the core structure of our language, it's so remote from common sense notions that it is not for the ear, but more soothing for the mind. It's striking the deeper we look into out cognitive faculties, the more it diverts from our presumptions. Man's fascination with machines and their impact began to fully realize itself with Galileo and Descartes, only to get smothered rather abruptly forever (apparently not) by Newton not too long after. We should pay much more attention to history, most certainly politically but scientifically as well.
NB: It's worth pointing out that towards the end of his life Hawking gained an interest in what is known as model dependent reality...which actually totally negates any notion of a "theory of everything". So, Hawking's book "The Grand Design" actually contradicts the very idea that a theory of everything is even possible. Hawking also worked with Professor Paul Davies on ideas about reverse causality....a very fringe and not widely accepted area of speculation. All of which shows he was open to new ideas. show less
Lo que está claro es que los libros de David Foster Wallace, o te gustan o no te gustan. Personalmente, prefiero cuando le da más importancia al fondo de la historia, que a la forma de contarla. Cuando no me gusta es cuando experimenta. En este sentido, 'Extinción' es el libro que más me ha gustado por ahora de DFW.
La característica más destacable de la escritura de DFW no es su calidad literaria, que la tiene y mucha, ni las historias que cuenta, que son magníficas, todo un prodigio show more de imaginación, agudeza y erudición; lo que destaca por encima de todo es su visión del mundo, su inteligencia a la hora de abrirnos los ojos a la realidad que nos rodea. Su ojo, su mente, es como un bisturí con el cual disecciona todo lo que cae bajo su punto de observación. DFW narra como si tuviera un zoom, está contándote una historia, para a continuación pasar a otro sub-tema, y a continuación a otro sub-sub-tema, todo ello con la máxima minuciosidad. No se trata de historias dentro de historias, como hace Paul Auster. Lo que desea hacer DFW es contarnos la historia abarcando todos los puntos de vista y con todos los detalles posibles, utilizando para ello estadísticas, Historia, matemáticas, física, etc., pero siempre con unas dosis de observación extraordinarias. Creo que DFW sacaría un buen relato hasta del prospecto de un medicamento.
Esta manera de narrar tan singular puede dejarte exhausto en algunos momentos (desde luego, no se trata de una lectura de metro), pero merece la pena no rendirse y seguir leyendo porque al acabar de leer el relato te das cuenta de la profundidad de DFW como escritor y persona. Su prosa puede parecer aséptica hasta cierto punto, sobre todo cuando entra en algunos detalles, pero es sólo una sensación superficial. A un nivel más profundo llegas a conocer tan íntimamente a los personajes que deseas seguir acompañándolos en sus tribulaciones.
Otro detalle a destacar de las historias de DFW es que no tienen ni principio ni final. Al término de sus relatos, da la impresión de que prodría seguir y seguir ad infinitum. DFW quería abarcar la vida entera de los personajes. Quizá me guste DFW como también me gusta la música minimalista, con la que pienso tiene similitudes. Una composición de Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Wim Mertens o Michael Nyman, tiene la misma estructura que un relato de DFW. Empieza con fuerza, no posee aparentemente melodía y termina abruptamente, pero te mantiene en un estado hipnótico durante unos minutos. La prosa de DFW es igual, con esos párrafos interminables, al estilo de Marcel Proust o Thomas Bernhard, que te mantienen pegado a sus páginas, hasta que de repente se acaban, casi como si fuesen una partitura porque poseen una musicalidad propia.
Estos son los ocho relatos contenidos en 'Extinción':
- Señor Blandito. (***) Un Grupo de Discusión está realizando unos test para el lanzamiento de un nuevo producto, un pastelido de nombre "¡Delitos!" Se trata de una terrible crítica a los medios publicitarios. El relato más duro de leer del libro, con el que hay que armarse de paciencia porque cuando llevas leídas unas páginas, todo encaja.
- El alma no es una forja. (*****) El protagonista nos cuenta el trauma que sufrieron tanto él como sus compañeros en la clase de Educación Cívica cuando eran niños, al mismo tiempo que recuerda las fantasías que se inventaba en clase, y cómo trata de entender la vida que llevó su padre durante esos años. Un relato maravilloso, una obra maestra. Sólo por este cuento merece la pena leer este libro.
- Encarnaciones de niños quemados. (****) En apenas tres páginas, el autor nos muestra un hecho puntual y trascendente en la vida de una familia.
- Otro pionero. (****) El protagonista recuerda una historia que le contó un amigo de un amigo que iba en un vuelo y que escuchó por casualidad. Se trata de una fábula sobre un niño que nació en una tribu paleolítica capaz de responder cualquier pregunta.
- El neón de siempre. (*****) El protagonista nos quiere explicar como todo su vida es un fraude. Otra muestra de la genialidad de DFW.
- La filosofía y el espejo de la naturaleza. (***) La madre del protagonista, el cual acaba de salir de prisión, está en juicios con unos cirujanos plásticos que le destrozaron la cara. Relato de humor negro con muy mala leche.
- Extinción. (****) Historia de un matrimonio, contada desde el punto de vista del marido, que pasa por un mal momento debido a los supuestos ronquidos de él. Gran relato, cuyo final me dejó francamente perturbado.
- El canal del sufrimiento. (***) Skip Atwater anda tras un personaje que podría darle el siguiente artículo en la revista para la que trabaja. Se trata de un "escultor" que "realiza" unas "figuritas" bastante curiosas. Otra crítica feroz, esta vez a la prensa amarillista y de cotilleo, pero también al mundo del arte, porque ¿quién tiene la potestad para decidir lo que es o no es arte? No cabe duda de que el sentido del humor de DFW era un poco especial. show less
La característica más destacable de la escritura de DFW no es su calidad literaria, que la tiene y mucha, ni las historias que cuenta, que son magníficas, todo un prodigio show more de imaginación, agudeza y erudición; lo que destaca por encima de todo es su visión del mundo, su inteligencia a la hora de abrirnos los ojos a la realidad que nos rodea. Su ojo, su mente, es como un bisturí con el cual disecciona todo lo que cae bajo su punto de observación. DFW narra como si tuviera un zoom, está contándote una historia, para a continuación pasar a otro sub-tema, y a continuación a otro sub-sub-tema, todo ello con la máxima minuciosidad. No se trata de historias dentro de historias, como hace Paul Auster. Lo que desea hacer DFW es contarnos la historia abarcando todos los puntos de vista y con todos los detalles posibles, utilizando para ello estadísticas, Historia, matemáticas, física, etc., pero siempre con unas dosis de observación extraordinarias. Creo que DFW sacaría un buen relato hasta del prospecto de un medicamento.
Esta manera de narrar tan singular puede dejarte exhausto en algunos momentos (desde luego, no se trata de una lectura de metro), pero merece la pena no rendirse y seguir leyendo porque al acabar de leer el relato te das cuenta de la profundidad de DFW como escritor y persona. Su prosa puede parecer aséptica hasta cierto punto, sobre todo cuando entra en algunos detalles, pero es sólo una sensación superficial. A un nivel más profundo llegas a conocer tan íntimamente a los personajes que deseas seguir acompañándolos en sus tribulaciones.
Otro detalle a destacar de las historias de DFW es que no tienen ni principio ni final. Al término de sus relatos, da la impresión de que prodría seguir y seguir ad infinitum. DFW quería abarcar la vida entera de los personajes. Quizá me guste DFW como también me gusta la música minimalista, con la que pienso tiene similitudes. Una composición de Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Wim Mertens o Michael Nyman, tiene la misma estructura que un relato de DFW. Empieza con fuerza, no posee aparentemente melodía y termina abruptamente, pero te mantiene en un estado hipnótico durante unos minutos. La prosa de DFW es igual, con esos párrafos interminables, al estilo de Marcel Proust o Thomas Bernhard, que te mantienen pegado a sus páginas, hasta que de repente se acaban, casi como si fuesen una partitura porque poseen una musicalidad propia.
Estos son los ocho relatos contenidos en 'Extinción':
- Señor Blandito. (***) Un Grupo de Discusión está realizando unos test para el lanzamiento de un nuevo producto, un pastelido de nombre "¡Delitos!" Se trata de una terrible crítica a los medios publicitarios. El relato más duro de leer del libro, con el que hay que armarse de paciencia porque cuando llevas leídas unas páginas, todo encaja.
- El alma no es una forja. (*****) El protagonista nos cuenta el trauma que sufrieron tanto él como sus compañeros en la clase de Educación Cívica cuando eran niños, al mismo tiempo que recuerda las fantasías que se inventaba en clase, y cómo trata de entender la vida que llevó su padre durante esos años. Un relato maravilloso, una obra maestra. Sólo por este cuento merece la pena leer este libro.
- Encarnaciones de niños quemados. (****) En apenas tres páginas, el autor nos muestra un hecho puntual y trascendente en la vida de una familia.
- Otro pionero. (****) El protagonista recuerda una historia que le contó un amigo de un amigo que iba en un vuelo y que escuchó por casualidad. Se trata de una fábula sobre un niño que nació en una tribu paleolítica capaz de responder cualquier pregunta.
- El neón de siempre. (*****) El protagonista nos quiere explicar como todo su vida es un fraude. Otra muestra de la genialidad de DFW.
- La filosofía y el espejo de la naturaleza. (***) La madre del protagonista, el cual acaba de salir de prisión, está en juicios con unos cirujanos plásticos que le destrozaron la cara. Relato de humor negro con muy mala leche.
- Extinción. (****) Historia de un matrimonio, contada desde el punto de vista del marido, que pasa por un mal momento debido a los supuestos ronquidos de él. Gran relato, cuyo final me dejó francamente perturbado.
- El canal del sufrimiento. (***) Skip Atwater anda tras un personaje que podría darle el siguiente artículo en la revista para la que trabaja. Se trata de un "escultor" que "realiza" unas "figuritas" bastante curiosas. Otra crítica feroz, esta vez a la prensa amarillista y de cotilleo, pero también al mundo del arte, porque ¿quién tiene la potestad para decidir lo que es o no es arte? No cabe duda de que el sentido del humor de DFW era un poco especial. show less
Mathematics is the best example we have of the eternal, universal forms suggested by ‘Socrates’ in the dialogues of Plato. Penrose affirms this understanding in his discussions of General Relativity (the Large) and Quantum Mechanics (the Small), then considers some of the obstacles to a Unified Grand Theory, and suggests how science might investigate the connection between the physical and mental realms. The passage from the axiomatic through the problematic to the speculative makes this show more a fascinating read in the philosophy of science.
Einstein’s discovery of the principles of General Relativity―not by observation, but through pure mathematical reasoning―indicates the congruence between mathematics and the physical world. Alas. After Einstein, we can describe the structure of space-time with extraordinary accuracy, but we cannot explain how that structure came to be. The cosmological uniformity that we can see now could only have evolved from an absurdly precise initial state, and that precision, says Penrose, must have something to do with the union of quantum mechanics and general relativity―except that quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible theories as they currently stand.
Quantum mechanics (also derived from ‘unreasonably effective’ mathematics) can explain the stability of atoms, chemical forces, the reliability of inheritance through DNA, lasers, superconductors, etc, etc, but cannot be magnified to the classical level without changing some fundamental rules (collapse of the wavefunction!!). Penrose reviews the fun bits of quantum theory (wave-particle duality, spin, non-local effects) before alighting on the paradox (‘the measurement problem’) which indicates that the theory is incomplete, wrong, or…something else. Rejecting the conventional ‘many-worlds’ response to Schrödinger’s live/dead Cat, Penrose suggests that the solution may have something to do with our understanding of Perception. Wow.
In the third chapter, “Physics and the Mind,” Penrose takes up the question of mind/matter duality. His position is that the physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot be simulated computationally. The brain is not a computer. (We understand natural numbers not because we have derived them from some set of computational rules, but because we have been able to make ‘contact’ with the Platonic world of mathematics.) Penrose speculates that the neural networks of the brain may exhibit large-scale quantum coherent activity and thus provide clues to a new theory of quantum gravity, which could serve to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity.
In the last section of the book, peers of Penrose offer their critiques of his ideas, reiterating for the reader key concepts and considerations. This is the best kind of book on the pursuit of knowledge, one that recognizes the gaps in our understanding while emphasizing the curiosity and wonder inherent in the endeavor. Bravo. show less
Einstein’s discovery of the principles of General Relativity―not by observation, but through pure mathematical reasoning―indicates the congruence between mathematics and the physical world. Alas. After Einstein, we can describe the structure of space-time with extraordinary accuracy, but we cannot explain how that structure came to be. The cosmological uniformity that we can see now could only have evolved from an absurdly precise initial state, and that precision, says Penrose, must have something to do with the union of quantum mechanics and general relativity―except that quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible theories as they currently stand.
Quantum mechanics (also derived from ‘unreasonably effective’ mathematics) can explain the stability of atoms, chemical forces, the reliability of inheritance through DNA, lasers, superconductors, etc, etc, but cannot be magnified to the classical level without changing some fundamental rules (collapse of the wavefunction!!). Penrose reviews the fun bits of quantum theory (wave-particle duality, spin, non-local effects) before alighting on the paradox (‘the measurement problem’) which indicates that the theory is incomplete, wrong, or…something else. Rejecting the conventional ‘many-worlds’ response to Schrödinger’s live/dead Cat, Penrose suggests that the solution may have something to do with our understanding of Perception. Wow.
In the third chapter, “Physics and the Mind,” Penrose takes up the question of mind/matter duality. His position is that the physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot be simulated computationally. The brain is not a computer. (We understand natural numbers not because we have derived them from some set of computational rules, but because we have been able to make ‘contact’ with the Platonic world of mathematics.) Penrose speculates that the neural networks of the brain may exhibit large-scale quantum coherent activity and thus provide clues to a new theory of quantum gravity, which could serve to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity.
In the last section of the book, peers of Penrose offer their critiques of his ideas, reiterating for the reader key concepts and considerations. This is the best kind of book on the pursuit of knowledge, one that recognizes the gaps in our understanding while emphasizing the curiosity and wonder inherent in the endeavor. Bravo. show less
This has to qualify as the most difficult book that I have ever read. As Francis Bacon said...."Some books are to be read with the speed of summer lightning and some are to be chewed and digested". Well I think "Fashion, Faith etc" has pretty much given me indigestion. And it's taken me months to wade my way through....a few pages at a time. As a general rule, I try to read books before I read the preface or the critiques so I can make up my own mind about it and not be prejudiced by other show more writers. In this case, I read the Mathematical Appendices after I had read the book. I'm still not sure if this was a mistake......because I couldn't understand a high proportion of the appendices either.
As many of the reviewers have commented; you need a very high level of mathematics to be able to follow this book...and even some of the reviewers with a high level of maths admitted to being overwhelmed. Well. I guess, Penrose is a Nobel Prize winner. And he's co-authored books with Steven Hawking, And he's made major contributions to Maths and Cosmology across fields such as Black holes and tile tessellation. So not surprising that he's going to be using maths that is well out of my league.
In fact, I found myself reading through paragraphs of equations with infinity raised to the power of 2, in turn raised to the power of 3 where Penrose says something like ...."well we can ignore this because it's vanishingly small in comparison with some other similar looking expression". To all of this I have to simply say: "Well, OK if you say so!"....I just have to take it at face value.....I have no way really of knowing if he's right but he usually reduces it all to some prose summary such as:(p116) "To sum it up, it does seem clear that the AdS.CFT correspondence [the Holographic Principle] has opened a huge new area of research, which has related many active areas of theoretical research, making unexpected connections between such disparate fields as condensed matter physics, black holes, and particle physics. On the other hand, there is a strange contrast between this great versatility and wealth of ideas, and the unreality of the immediate picture of the world that it projects. It depends upon the wrong sign for the cosmological constant; it requires 4 generators of super symmetry, whereas none has been observed; it requires a gauge symmetry group acting on infinitely many parameters instead of the 3 that particle physics requires; and it's bulk space-time has 1 too many dimensions! it will be most fascinating to see where all of this leads". In other words; a fairly damning round-up of criticisms.
I write these reviews really for my own edification and as memory joggers not for any other readers (sorry) so I'm including an extract here from another reviewer on "Goodreads", Athan Tolis......he rather nicely summarises some of the main threads of Penrose's arguments, viz:
1. Highly fashionable 26-dimension string theory, while elegant and originally promising, is likely a dead end, for example because it leads to singularities
2. Supersymmetry between Fermions and Bosons cuts down the dimensions of string theory to a more manageable 10, but makes it necessary to believe in the existence of a whole lot of particles we will never observe
3. The holographic conjecture, while beautiful, relies on supersymmetry and requires that we radically revise what we believe about the cosmological constant, the gauge symmetry group and bulk space
4. Quantum entanglement is probably ultimately only a feature of the simplified, linear orthodoxy we cling to in Quantum Mechanics, which we will one day abandon for a nonlinear model. The Quantum Mechanics of the present is useful, but requires a leap of faith you should refuse to take.
5. Inflationary Cosmology poses even more problems than it answers questions and is a convenient untruth.
Basically, Penrose is saying that a lot of what physicists are saying about cosmology is based on fashion, faith and pure fantasy and the proponents are ignoring or glossing-over the very real mathematical problems in their quests.
I found myself wondering why Penrose himself was so against something like string theory; why he was opting for a simpler view of the universe? Was it because he was taking Occam's Razor seriously? Was it because he had his own Twistor theory that hadn't really caught on? Or was it because he agreed with Einstein, and many others, that the mathematics really was reflecting some sort of reality that we should, ultimately, be able to grasp?
I recall attending a lecture by Penrose at the Australian National University where he ran through some mathematics and showed some sort of matrix which he said "was intuitively obvious......that everyone would accept it". I was not quite convinced and my doubts were compounded when my Philosophy supervisor who was sitting alongside me commented that he was not sure that Penrose understood the psychology/philosophy of mathematics all that well. Not sure who was correct but it did sow the seed of doubt that even giant intellects sometimes get it wrong.
However, I thought that Penrose showed great intellectual honesty on p392 where he says that he has both a public reason and a private reason for objecting to higher-dimensional theories. The public reason would indeed be one based largely on the problems raised by the excessive functional freedom, but the private one was that from his undergraduate days he had been smitten by the power and the magic of complex analysis and geometry and had become convinced that this magic must also lie deep in the fundamental workings of the world. And he seemed to find this in with his twistor theory and the link between 3-dimensional geometry and quantum mechanical amplitudes but also a somewhat different link between the Lorenz group and the Riemann sphere. Both these relationships demanded the particulate space-time dimensionality that we see about us. So when he heard that string theory, to which he had initially been attracted .....had moved in the direction of requiring all these extra spatial dimensions...he was horrified ....and "found it impossible to believe that nature would have rejected all those beautiful connections with Lorenzian-4 space...and still do".
So it seems to me that Penrose is here confessing that he has his own brand of faith too.
But I come away from the book mildly depressed. I had believed that the great mathematicians of our time and the great cosmologists were actually getting close to the universal theory that would explain everything. But Penrose has me, more or less, convinced that, at best, we are a very long way from that universal equation and that many of the physicists didn't understand the underpinnings and the weaknesses in much of their mathematics.
And as for Penrose, I do have some sympathy that his twistor theory has never really become fashionable. After all.....it seems that to be successful in physics as in many other professions one has to be both fashionable and have faith in the latest fantasies.
If I gave this book 5 stars, I would be kidding myself because I probably only followed about 25% of it but to give it less than 4 stars would be churlish. Clearly it is a significant work. I just wish, more people (including myself) had the education to be able to understand all of it. show less
As many of the reviewers have commented; you need a very high level of mathematics to be able to follow this book...and even some of the reviewers with a high level of maths admitted to being overwhelmed. Well. I guess, Penrose is a Nobel Prize winner. And he's co-authored books with Steven Hawking, And he's made major contributions to Maths and Cosmology across fields such as Black holes and tile tessellation. So not surprising that he's going to be using maths that is well out of my league.
In fact, I found myself reading through paragraphs of equations with infinity raised to the power of 2, in turn raised to the power of 3 where Penrose says something like ...."well we can ignore this because it's vanishingly small in comparison with some other similar looking expression". To all of this I have to simply say: "Well, OK if you say so!"....I just have to take it at face value.....I have no way really of knowing if he's right but he usually reduces it all to some prose summary such as:(p116) "To sum it up, it does seem clear that the AdS.CFT correspondence [the Holographic Principle] has opened a huge new area of research, which has related many active areas of theoretical research, making unexpected connections between such disparate fields as condensed matter physics, black holes, and particle physics. On the other hand, there is a strange contrast between this great versatility and wealth of ideas, and the unreality of the immediate picture of the world that it projects. It depends upon the wrong sign for the cosmological constant; it requires 4 generators of super symmetry, whereas none has been observed; it requires a gauge symmetry group acting on infinitely many parameters instead of the 3 that particle physics requires; and it's bulk space-time has 1 too many dimensions! it will be most fascinating to see where all of this leads". In other words; a fairly damning round-up of criticisms.
I write these reviews really for my own edification and as memory joggers not for any other readers (sorry) so I'm including an extract here from another reviewer on "Goodreads", Athan Tolis......he rather nicely summarises some of the main threads of Penrose's arguments, viz:
1. Highly fashionable 26-dimension string theory, while elegant and originally promising, is likely a dead end, for example because it leads to singularities
2. Supersymmetry between Fermions and Bosons cuts down the dimensions of string theory to a more manageable 10, but makes it necessary to believe in the existence of a whole lot of particles we will never observe
3. The holographic conjecture, while beautiful, relies on supersymmetry and requires that we radically revise what we believe about the cosmological constant, the gauge symmetry group and bulk space
4. Quantum entanglement is probably ultimately only a feature of the simplified, linear orthodoxy we cling to in Quantum Mechanics, which we will one day abandon for a nonlinear model. The Quantum Mechanics of the present is useful, but requires a leap of faith you should refuse to take.
5. Inflationary Cosmology poses even more problems than it answers questions and is a convenient untruth.
Basically, Penrose is saying that a lot of what physicists are saying about cosmology is based on fashion, faith and pure fantasy and the proponents are ignoring or glossing-over the very real mathematical problems in their quests.
I found myself wondering why Penrose himself was so against something like string theory; why he was opting for a simpler view of the universe? Was it because he was taking Occam's Razor seriously? Was it because he had his own Twistor theory that hadn't really caught on? Or was it because he agreed with Einstein, and many others, that the mathematics really was reflecting some sort of reality that we should, ultimately, be able to grasp?
I recall attending a lecture by Penrose at the Australian National University where he ran through some mathematics and showed some sort of matrix which he said "was intuitively obvious......that everyone would accept it". I was not quite convinced and my doubts were compounded when my Philosophy supervisor who was sitting alongside me commented that he was not sure that Penrose understood the psychology/philosophy of mathematics all that well. Not sure who was correct but it did sow the seed of doubt that even giant intellects sometimes get it wrong.
However, I thought that Penrose showed great intellectual honesty on p392 where he says that he has both a public reason and a private reason for objecting to higher-dimensional theories. The public reason would indeed be one based largely on the problems raised by the excessive functional freedom, but the private one was that from his undergraduate days he had been smitten by the power and the magic of complex analysis and geometry and had become convinced that this magic must also lie deep in the fundamental workings of the world. And he seemed to find this in with his twistor theory and the link between 3-dimensional geometry and quantum mechanical amplitudes but also a somewhat different link between the Lorenz group and the Riemann sphere. Both these relationships demanded the particulate space-time dimensionality that we see about us. So when he heard that string theory, to which he had initially been attracted .....had moved in the direction of requiring all these extra spatial dimensions...he was horrified ....and "found it impossible to believe that nature would have rejected all those beautiful connections with Lorenzian-4 space...and still do".
So it seems to me that Penrose is here confessing that he has his own brand of faith too.
But I come away from the book mildly depressed. I had believed that the great mathematicians of our time and the great cosmologists were actually getting close to the universal theory that would explain everything. But Penrose has me, more or less, convinced that, at best, we are a very long way from that universal equation and that many of the physicists didn't understand the underpinnings and the weaknesses in much of their mathematics.
And as for Penrose, I do have some sympathy that his twistor theory has never really become fashionable. After all.....it seems that to be successful in physics as in many other professions one has to be both fashionable and have faith in the latest fantasies.
If I gave this book 5 stars, I would be kidding myself because I probably only followed about 25% of it but to give it less than 4 stars would be churlish. Clearly it is a significant work. I just wish, more people (including myself) had the education to be able to understand all of it. show less
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