Everything about Roger Penrose totally explained
Sir Roger Penrose,
OM,
FRS (born
8 August 1931) is an
English mathematical physicist and
Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the
Mathematical Institute,
University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of
Wadham College. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to
general relativity and
cosmology. He is also a
recreational mathematician and
philosopher. Roger Penrose is the son of
scientist Lionel S. Penrose and Margaret Leathes, and the brother of mathematician
Oliver Penrose and
correspondence chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. He was born in
Colchester,
Essex,
England.
Career
Penrose graduated with a first class degree in
mathematics from
University College London. In
1955, while still a student, Penrose reinvented the generalized matrix inverse (also known as
Moore-Penrose inverse, see Penrose, R. "A Generalized Inverse for Matrices." Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. 51, 406-413, 1955.) Penrose earned his Ph.D. at
Cambridge (
St John's College) in 1958, writing a thesis on
tensor methods in algebraic geometry under the well known algebraist and geometer
John A. Todd. In
1965 at Cambridge, Penrose proved that
singularities (such as
black holes) could be formed from the gravitational collapse of dying immense
stars. (Ferguson, 1991: 66).
In
1967, Penrose invented the
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 the one in the centre of a black hole) by hiding them from our view behind an
event horizon. This form is now known as the
weak censorship hypothesis; in 1979, Penrose formulated a stronger version called the
strong censorship hypothesis. Together with the
BKL conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in
general relativity. Also from 1979 dates Penrose's influential
Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the
Universe and the origin of the
second law of thermodynamics.
Roger Penrose is well known for his
1974 discovery of
Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only
tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. In
1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in
quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is 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). In
2004 Penrose released, a 1,099-page book aimed at giving a comprehensive guide to the
laws of physics. In the June 2005 issue of
Discover magazine
, Penrose outlined
his interpretation of
quantum mechanics. Penrose is currently the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished (visiting) Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Penn State University.
Physics and consciousness
Penrose has written
controversial books on the connection between fundamental physics and human consciousness. In
The Emperor's New Mind (
1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness. Penrose hints at the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he terms
correct quantum gravity, CQG). He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it's a deterministic system that for the most part simply executes algorithms, as a billiard table where billiard balls act as message carriers and their interactions act as logical decisions. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the human mind are completely
algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer -- this is in contrast to views, for example,
Biological Naturalism, that human behavior but not consciousness might be simulated. This is based on claims that human consciousness transcends
formal logic systems because things such as the insolubility 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 expanding 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 isn't limited to formal logic. Furthermore, he says that
AI programs can also conclude that false statements are true, so error isn't unique to humans.
Penrose and
Stuart Hameroff have speculated that human
consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in
microtubules, which they dubbed
Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction). 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'd 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. It has been claimed by Hameroff to be based on a number of incorrect assumptions (see linked paper below from Hameroff,
Hagan and
Tuszyński), but Tegmark in turn has argued that the critique is invalid (see rejoinder link below). In particular, Hameroff points out the peculiarity that Tegmark's formula for the decoherence time includes a factor of
for the decoherence time.
Awards and honours
Penrose has been awarded many prizes for his contributions to science. He was elected a
Fellow of the
Royal Society of London in
1972. In
1975,
Stephen Hawking and Penrose were jointly awarded the
Eddington Medal of the
Royal Astronomical Society. In
1985, he was awarded the
Royal Society Royal Medal. Along with
Stephen Hawking, he was awarded the prestigious
Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in
1988. In
1989 he was awarded the
Dirac Medal and Prize of the British
Institute of Physics. In
1990 Penrose was awarded the
Albert Einstein Medal for outstanding work related to the work of
Albert Einstein by the
Albert Einstein Society. In 1991, he was awarded the Naylor Prize of the
London Mathematical Society. From 1992 to 1995 he served as President of the
International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation
.
In
1994, Penrose was
knighted for services to science. In
1998, he was elected Foreign Associate of the
United States National Academy of Sciences. In
2000 he was appointed to the
Order of Merit. In
2004 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:
» His deep work on General Relativity has been a major factor in our understanding of black holes. His development of Twistor Theory has produced a beautiful and productive approach to the classical equations of mathematical physics. His tilings of the plane underlie the newly discovered quasi-crystals.
In
2005 Penrose was awarded an honorary doctorate (
Honoris Causa) by
Warsaw University and
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and in
2006 by the
University of York. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the
British Humanist Association.
Miscellany
Personal life
Father: Lionel S. Penrose
Mother: Margaret Leathes
Brother: Oliver Penrose (mathematician)
Brother: Jonathan Penrose (chess master)
Wife: Vanessa Thomas (two children)
Three sons from first marriage, to an American
Books
Roger Penrose, Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity, Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics, 1972, ISBN 0-89871-005-7 (rare)
Roger Penrose and Wolfgang Rindler, Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 1, Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields, Cambridge University Press, 1987 (reprint), ISBN 0-521-33707-0 (paperback)
Roger Penrose and Wolfgang Rindler, Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 2, Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry, Cambridge University Press, 1988 (reprint), ISBN 0-521-34786-6 (paperback)
Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The Laws of Physics, Oxford University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-14-014534-6 (paperback). Received the Rhone-Poulenc science book prize in 1990.
Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-19-853978-9 (hardback)
Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, foreword by Michael Atiyah, University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-691-03791-4 (hardback), ISBN 0-691-05084-8 (paperback)
- Hawking's part is freely available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409195
Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking), Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-56330-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-521-65538-2 (paperback), Canto edition: ISBN 0-521-78572-3
Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose, White Mars Or, The Mind Set Free, Little, Brown, 1999, ISBN 978-0-316-85243-2 (hardback)
Roger Penrose,, Jonathan Cape, London, 2004, ISBN 0-224-04447-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-09-944068-7 (paperback)Further Information
Get more info on 'Roger Penrose'.
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