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Other authors named Roger:
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Author's popularity: 1
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about. |
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Vote: | As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness. |
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Vote: | As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on. |
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Vote: | But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality. |
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Vote: | But twistor theory is the thing that I would like to be remembered for most, I suppose. |
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Vote: | Entire lights rays - you see if you made space, each of whose points represented an entire light ray, you'd find that space had five dimensions. |
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Vote: | I certainly don't believe that these things like Terminator or something coming from the future who is a mechanical entity. |
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Vote: | I find it amusing and entertaining and I've always been a fan of science fiction. I used to read it a lot when I was younger. |
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Vote: | I like science fiction movies, but I think they are useful for giving us ideas and I think science fiction is very good at giving ideas. |
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Vote: | I used to take these maths tests which were supposed to be done in one period and it took me not just that period but the next one which was a play period and somethimes the one beyond that before I finished the test. |
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Vote: | I was indeed very slow as a youngster. |
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Vote: | I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to problems. |
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Vote: | If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it. |
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Vote: | In fact you may be surprised by this, I was even moved down a class once because I couldn't do mental arithmetic. |
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Vote: | In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature. |
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Vote: | My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go. |
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Vote: | Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion. |
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Vote: | People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that. |
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Vote: | So I think that the issue of how consciousness relates to the physical world is all tied up with morality but we have a lot to learn on that one. |
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Vote: | So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity. |
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Vote: | Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations. |
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Vote: | The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions. |
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Vote: | The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself. |
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Vote: | This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it. |
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Vote: | Well I didn't actually see the Matrix but I've seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes. |
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Vote: | Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has. |
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Vote: | Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much. |
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Biography
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]Sir Roger Penrose OM (born August 8 1931) is an English scientist and academician. He is highly regarded for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and controversial philosopher. Roger Penrose is the son of scientist Lionel S. Penrose, and the brother of mathematician Oliver Penrose and chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose.
Career In 1967, Penrose invented twistor theory which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2). In 1969 he conjectured the cosmic censorship hypothesis. This proposes (rather informally) that the universe protects us from the inherent unpredictability of singularities (such as black holes) by hiding them from our view.
Roger Penrose is well-known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane aperiodically. In 1984, similar patterns were found in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. His most important contribution may be his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams).
He has written controversial books such as The Emperor's New Mind (1989) in which he argues that known laws of physics do not constitute a complete system and that human consciousness cannot be explained until a new physical theory (what he terms correct quantum gravity, CQG) has been devised. He argues against the strong AI viewpoint that the processes of the human mind are algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This is based on claims that human consciousness transcends formal logic systems because things such as the insolvability of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem restrict an algorithmically based logic from traits such as mathematical insight. These claims were originally made by the philosopher John Lucas of Merton College, Oxford.
In 1994, Penrose followed up The Emperor's New Mind with Shadows of the Mind and in 1997 with The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, further updating and explaining his theories.
Penrose's views on the human thought process are not widely accepted in scientific circles. According to Marvin Minsky, because people can construe false ideas to be factual, the process of thinking is not limited to formal logic. Further, AI programs can also conclude that false statements are true, so error is not unique to humans. Another dissenter, Charles Seife, has said, "Penrose, the Oxford mathematician famous for his work on tiling the plane with various shapes, is one of a handful of scientists who believe that the ephemeral nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process."
Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules. But Max Tegmark, in a paper in Physical Review E, calculated that the time scale of neuron firing and excitations in microtubules is slower than the decoherence time by a factor of at least 10,000,000,000. The reception of the paper is summed up by this statement in his support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along. 'We're not working with a brain that's near absolute zero. It's reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior', he says." The Tegmark paper has been widely cited by critics of the Penrose-Hameroff proposal. However, it has since been claimed by Hameroff to be based on a number of incorrect assumptions. See the refutation linked below from Hameroff, Hagan and Tuczynksi.
In 2004 Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page book aimed at giving a comprehensive guide to the laws of physics. In the same year he was awarded the De Morgan Medal for his wide and original contributions to mathematical physics, to quote the citation from the London Mathematical Society
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roger Penrose".
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