Roger Penrose’s Impossible Diagrams | More than Nothing: A History of the Vacuum in Theoretical Physics, 1925-1980 (2024)

FAQs

What is Roger Penrose's theory? ›

In this theory, Penrose postulates that at the end of the universe all matter is eventually contained within black holes, which subsequently evaporate via Hawking radiation. At this point, everything contained within the universe consists of photons, which "experience" neither time nor space.

Penrose theorises that the wave function cannot be sustained in superposition beyond a certain energy difference between the quantum states. He gives an approximate value for this difference: a Planck mass worth of matter, which he calls the "'one-graviton' level".

Roger's 1965 paper on this, earned his share of the 2020 Physics Nobel Prize. It had been motivated by the discovery of the violently energetic quasars, indicating the presence of very distant enormous gravitational collapse events – black holes!

Roger's numerous awards include the Eddington Medal, the Royal Medal, the Dirac Medal, the Albert Einstein Medal , and the de Morgan Medal. He is a past President of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. Roger was knighted in 1994, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000.

Occasionally, Penrose teetered on the edge of something like a qualified acceptance of God as a valid explanation, saying, “There could be a truth in such a view, but I don't see why I'm driven to believe that, and I don't see why it should be a conscious thing. I mean it could be – I'm not saying I deny it.

Penrose tells the story of a brother and sister searching for clues about their mother, a scientist who disappeared under mysterious circ*mstances when they were children. In practice, it's less of a narrative than a kind of open-world puzzle game that uses text as a scrollable landscape.

His breakthrough insight occurred during a walk through London. Penrose imagined what he called a “trapped surface”: a closed, two-dimensional surface that directed all light rays to an infinitely dense center. This describes what we now call the black hole's singularity.

Penrose's theory proposes that each gravity-induced collapse causes a little blip of proto-consciousness: micro-events that get organized by biological structures called microtubules inside our brains into full-bodied awareness. A conscious observer doesn't cause wave function collapse.

Penrose's equation is presented as a conformal Killing-Yano equation and the class of possible solutions is analyzed. It is shown that solutions exist in spacetimes of Petrov type O, D or N. In the particular case of the Kerr background, it is shown that there can be no Killing potential for the axial Killing vector.

People thought they shouldn't be there in general, and I think that's what Einstein would have thought too. I never met Einstein.

What degrees does Roger Penrose have? ›

Penrose attended University College School followed by University College and graduated with a first class degree in mathematics. Penrose continued his education at Cambridge University and obtained a PhD in algebraic geometry in 1957, but by this time he had already become interested in physics.

Answer and Explanation: Though he was a huge name in the field of science, Stephen Hawking did not ever win a Nobel Prize of any kind. It might seem unfair, due to the his immense contributions in science and physics, but there is a good reason why he was never awarded the honor.

It cannot exist as a solid object in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space, although its surface can be embedded isometrically (bent but not stretched) in five-dimensional Euclidean space.

Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness.

A black hole is a volume of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. This astonishing idea was first announced in 1783 by John Michell, an English country parson.

Penrose's theory proposes that each gravity-induced collapse causes a little blip of proto-consciousness: micro-events that get organized by biological structures called microtubules inside our brains into full-bodied awareness. A conscious observer doesn't cause wave function collapse.

In this post I'll give an overview of Roger Penrose's model of the Universe in which it passes endlessly through a possibly infinite number of cycles (or aeons) each of which starts with a Big Bang and ends with a rapidly expanding empty universe.

Orch OR combines the Penrose–Lucas argument with Hameroff's hypothesis on quantum processing in microtubules. It proposes that when condensates in the brain undergo an objective wave function reduction, their collapse connects noncomputational decision-making to experiences embedded in spacetime's fundamental geometry.