Roger Penrose: "Consciousness must be beyond computable physics"

The mathematician shares his latest theories connected quantum consciousness, the operation of the beingness and however to pass with civilisations from different cosmological aeons

Physics 14 November 2022

Dave Stock

EARLY successful his career, the University of Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose inspired the creator M. C. Escher to make Ascending and Descending, the ocular illusion of a loop of staircase that seems to beryllium eternally rising. It remains a fitting metaphor for Penrose’s ever enquiring mind. During his agelong career, helium has collaborated with Stephen Hawking to uncover the secrets of the large bang, developed a quantum mentation of consciousness with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and won the Nobel prize successful physics for his prediction of regions wherever the gravitational tract would beryllium truthful aggravated that space-time itself would interruption down, the alleged singularity astatine the bosom of a achromatic hole. Undeterred by the march of clip – Penrose turned 91 this twelvemonth – helium is continuing to innovate, and adjacent readying communications with aboriginal universes.

Michael Brooks: In 1965, adjacent the commencement of your career, you utilized wide relativity to marque the archetypal prediction of the beingness of singularities, arsenic successful the centres of achromatic holes. How did it consciousness to spot the archetypal photograph of a achromatic hole much than fractional a period later?

Roger Penrose: If I’m honest, it didn’t marque overmuch content connected maine due to the fact that I was expecting these things by then. However, backmost erstwhile I archetypal proved this [singularity] theorem, it was rather a funny situation: I was visiting Princeton to springiness a speech and I retrieve Bob Dicke – a well-known cosmologist, a precise distinguished antheral – came and slapped maine connected the backmost and said, “You’ve done it, you’ve shown wide relativity is wrong!” And that was rather a communal view. I fishy that adjacent Einstein would astir apt person had that …