ROGER PENROSE

Roger Penrose has been my scientific hero for a very long time.  He might not be the smartest, for 47-year old Terence Tao, the Mozart of Maths, at 230, has a higher IQ.  Setting aside intelligence quotients, one list early this year has Stephen Hawking (IQ only 160-170), who passed away five years ago, as the smartest ever.  In this ranking, Tao only comes in at #27, with Benjamin Netanyahu (the leader of Israel, 180) #12, James Woods (180, the actor) #18 and Marilyn Vos Savant (who Guinness had in 1986 as possessing the highest IQ in the world at 186) #20.  No sign of Penrose.

Who is Roger Penrose?  From Wikipedia:

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  Was born in England and is now 91 years old.
• Is an emeritus professor of math at Oxford.
• Won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for "discovering" the concept of the Black Hole.
• In his twenties communicated with MC Escher to create the Penrose Triangle.  Simple, yet impossible.

His 1974 Penrose tiling is difficult to explain, but was observed a decade later in an arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals.

In 2010 he reported possible evidence of an earlier universe existing before the Big Bang of our present universe.  In short, he believes that the Einstein field equation singularity is equivalent to what occurs at the event horizon of a black hole, time of the Big Bang and the concept of an infinitely expanding horizon, and can be removed by a change of coordinate system.  And if that sounds mystifying, try to comprehend his connection between fundamental physics and human consciousness.

From Wikipedia:

His popular publications include:

• The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The Laws of Physics (1989)^[94]

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  Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994)^[95]

• The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004)^[96]
• Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (2010)^[97]
• Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)^[98]

His co-authored publications include:

• The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking) (1996)^[99]
• The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking) (1997)^[100]
• White Mars: The Mind Set Free (with Brian Aldiss) (1999)^[101]

On the matter of religion, while he is agnostic, here is what he says about our universe:

During an interview with BBC Radio 4 on 25 September 2010, Penrose stated, "I'm not a believer myself. I don't believe in established religions of any kind."^[120] He regards himself as an agnostic.^[121] In the 1991 film A Brief History of Time, he also said, "I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it's not somehow just there by chance … some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along—it's a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it."^[122]

At the conclusion of his recent New Scientist interview on Cosmic Thoughts, he thought Humanity has been pretty lucky to still be around because we have so far avoided a nuclear catastrophe, with who knows what else is to come.  He advocates, like I do, and once did at the NASA Ames Research Center, that we search for successful extraterrestrial civilizations to learn how they overcame.  A You Tube on his thoughts.

Incidentally, it is Sir Roger Penrose, for he was knighted in 1994.  There must be a hundred You Tube links to his thoughts.  Here is one on Math, Physics and the World (Part 1).  A lecture on Before the Beginning and Beyond Eternity.  Finally, his 2020 Nobel lecture.

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