Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.

Penrose has made contributions to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity," which he shared with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.[1]

Early life and academia

Born in Colchester, Essex, Roger Penrose is a son of psychiatrist and geneticist Lionel Penrose and Margaret Leathes,[a] and the grandson of the physiologist John Beresford Leathes and his wife, a Russian Jew, Sonia Marie Natanson,[2][3] who had left St. Petersburg in the late 1880s.[4] His uncle was artist Roland Penrose, whose son with photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of physicist Oliver Penrose and of chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Penrose attended University College School and University College, London, where he graduated with a first class degree in mathematics. In 1955, while still a student, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse,[5] after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar in 1951. Having started research under the professor of geometry and astronomy, Sir W. V. D. Hodge, Penrose finished his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1958, with a thesis on "tensor methods in algebraic geometry" under algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form", and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall, and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose.[

As reviewer Manjit Kumar puts it:

As a student in 1954, Penrose was attending a conference in Amsterdam when by chance he came across an exhibition of Escher's work. Soon he was trying to conjure up impossible figures of his own and discovered the tribar [see tri-bar for an image] – a triangle that looks like a real, solid three-dimensional object, but isn't. Together with his father, a physicist and mathematician, Penrose went on to design a staircase that simultaneously loops up and down. An article followed and a copy was sent to Escher. Completing a cyclical flow of creativity, the Dutch master of geometrical illusions was inspired to produce his two masterpieces.[6]

Having become a reader at Birkbeck College, London (and having had his attention drawn from pure mathematics to astrophysics by the cosmologist Dennis Sciama, then at Cambridge) it was in 1964 that, in the words of Kip Thorne of Caltech, "Roger Penrose revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime". Until then work on the curved geometry of general relativity had been confined to configurations with sufficiently high symmetry for Einstein's equations to be soluble explicitly, and there was doubt about whether such cases were typical. One approach to this issue was by the use of perturbation theory, as developed under the leadership of John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. The other, more radically innovative, approach initiated by Penrose was to overlook the detailed geometrical structure of spacetime and instead concentrate attention just on the topology of the space, or at most its conformal structure, since it is the latter – as determined by the lay of the lightcones – that determines the trajectories of lightlike geodesics, and hence their causal relationships. The importance of Penrose's epoch-making paper "Gravitational collapse and space-time singularities"[7] was not only its result (roughly that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form some kind of singularity). It also showed a way to obtain similarly general conclusions in other contexts, notably that of the cosmological Big Bang, which he dealt with in collaboration with Dennis Sciama's most famous student, Stephen Hawking.[citation needed]
Predicted view from outside the event horizon of a black hole lit by a thin accretion disc

It was in the local context of gravitational collapse that the contribution of Penrose was most decisive, starting with his 1969 cosmic censorship conjecture, to the effect that any ensuing singularities would be confined within a well-behaved event horizon surrounding a hidden space-time region for which Wheeler coined the term black hole, leaving a visible exterior region with strong but finite curvature, from which some of the gravitational energy may be extractable by what is known as the Penrose process, while accretion of surrounding matter may release further energy that can account for astrophysical phenomena such as quasars.

Following up his "weak cosmic censorship hypothesis", Penrose went on, in 1979, to formulate 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.[8] Penrose and James Terrell independently realised that objects travelling near the speed of light will appear to undergo a peculiar skewing or rotation. This effect has come to be called the Terrell rotation or Penrose–Terrell rotation.[9][10]

Oil painting by Urs Schmid (1995) of a Penrose tiling using fat and thin rhombi.

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).[citation needed]

A Penrose tiling

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. Penrose developed these ideas based on the article Deux types fondamentaux de distribution statistique[11] (1938; an English translation Two Basic Types of Statistical Distribution) by Czech geographer, demographer and statistician Jaromír Korčák. In 1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals.[12] 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 popularising what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams).[citation needed]

In 1983, Penrose was invited to teach at Rice University in Houston, by the then provost Bill Gordon. He worked there from 1983 to 1987.[13]

Later activity

In 2004, Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page comprehensive guide to the Laws of Physics that includes an explanation of his own theory. The Penrose Interpretation predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference of space-time curvature attains a significant level.[14][15]

Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.[16]
An earlier universe
WMAP image of the (extremely tiny) anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation

In 2010, Penrose reported possible evidence, based on concentric circles found in WMAP data of the CMB sky, of an earlier universe existing before the Big Bang of our own present universe.[17] He mentions this evidence in the epilogue of his 2010 book Cycles of Time,[18] a book in which he presents his reasons, to do with Einstein's field equations, the Weyl curvature C, and the Weyl curvature hypothesis (WCH), that the transition at the Big Bang could have been smooth enough for a previous universe to survive it. He made several conjectures about C and the WCH, some of which were subsequently proved by others, and he also popularized his conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) theory.

In simple terms, he believes that the singularity in Einstein's field equation at the Big Bang is only an apparent singularity, similar to the well-known apparent singularity at the event horizon of a black hole. The latter singularity can be removed by a change of coordinate system, and Penrose proposes a different change of coordinate system that will remove the singularity at the big bang. One implication of this is that the major events at the Big Bang can be understood without unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, and therefore we are not necessarily constrained by the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, which disrupts time. Alternatively, one can use the Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations.[citation needed]
Physics and consciousness
Penrose at a conference.
Part of a series on
Physical cosmology
Full-sky image derived from nine years' WMAP data

Big Bang · Universe
Age of the universe
Chronology of the universe

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Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls correct quantum gravity). Penrose uses a variant of Turing's halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (For example, imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. If the system's state is ON when a given Turing machine halts and OFF when the Turing machine does not halt, then the system's state is completely determined by the machine; nevertheless, there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.)[citation needed]

Penrose believes that such deterministic yet non-algorithmic processes may come into play in the quantum mechanical wave function reduction, and may be harnessed by the brain. He argues that computers today are unable to have intelligence because they are algorithmically deterministic systems. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This contrasts with supporters of strong artificial intelligence, who contend that thought can be simulated algorithmically. He bases this on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem prevent an algorithmically based system of logic from reproducing such traits of human intelligence as mathematical insight. These claims were originally espoused by the philosopher John Lucas of Merton College, Oxford.[citation needed]

The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence has been widely criticised by mathematicians, computer scientists and philosophers, and the consensus among experts in these fields seems to be that the argument fails, though different authors may choose different aspects of the argument to attack.[19] Marvin Minsky, a leading proponent of artificial intelligence, was particularly critical, stating that Penrose "tries to show, in chapter after chapter, that human thought cannot be based on any known scientific principle." Minsky's position is exactly the opposite – he believed that humans are, in fact, machines, whose functioning, although complex, is fully explainable by current physics. Minsky maintained that "one can carry that quest [for scientific explanation] too far by only seeking new basic principles instead of attacking the real detail. This is what I see in Penrose's quest for a new basic principle of physics that will account for consciousness."[20]

Penrose responded to criticism of The Emperor's New Mind with his follow up 1994 book Shadows of the Mind, and in 1997 with The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. In those works, he also combined his observations with that of anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.

Penrose and Hameroff have argued that consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules, which they dubbed Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction). Max Tegmark, in a paper in Physical Review E,[21] 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 Tegmark's support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John A. 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'".[22] Tegmark's paper has been widely cited by critics of the Penrose–Hameroff position.

In their reply to Tegmark's paper, also published in Physical Review E, the physicists Scott Hagan, Jack Tuszyński and Hameroff[23][24] claimed that Tegmark did not address the Orch-OR model, but instead a model of his own construction. This involved superpositions of quanta separated by 24 nm rather than the much smaller separations stipulated for Orch-OR. As a result, Hameroff's group claimed a decoherence time seven orders of magnitude greater than Tegmark's, but still well short of the 25 ms required if the quantum processing in the theory was to be linked to the 40 Hz gamma synchrony, as Orch-OR suggested. To bridge this gap, the group made a series of proposals.[citation needed]

They supposed that the interiors of neurons could alternate between liquid and gel states. In the gel state, it was further hypothesized that the water electrical dipoles are oriented in the same direction, along the outer edge of the microtubule tubulin subunits. Hameroff et al. proposed that this ordered water could screen any quantum coherence within the tubulin of the microtubules from the environment of the rest of the brain. Each tubulin also has a tail extending out from the microtubules, which is negatively charged, and therefore attracts positively charged ions. It is suggested that this could provide further screening. Further to this, there was a suggestion that the microtubules could be pumped into a coherent state by biochemical energy.
Roger Penrose in the University of Santiago de Compostela to receive the Fonseca Prize.

Finally, he suggested that the configuration of the microtubule lattice might be suitable for quantum error correction, a means of holding together quantum coherence in the face of environmental interaction.[citation needed]

Hameroff, in a lecture in part of a Google Tech talks series exploring quantum biology, gave an overview of current research in the area, and responded to subsequent criticisms of the Orch-OR model.[25] In addition to this, a 2011 paper by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff published in the fringe Journal of Cosmology gives an updated model of their Orch-OR theory, in light of criticisms, and discusses the place of consciousness within the universe.[26]

Phillip Tetlow, although himself supportive of Penrose's views, acknowledges that Penrose's ideas about the human thought process are at present a minority view in scientific circles, citing Minsky's criticisms and quoting science journalist Charles Seife's description of Penrose as "one of a handful of scientists" who believe that the nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process.[22]

In January 2014 Hameroff and Penrose claimed that a discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan[27] confirms the hypothesis of Orch-OR theory.[28] A reviewed and updated version of the theory was published along with critical commentary and debate in the March 2014 issue of Physics of Life Reviews.[29]
Personal life
Family life

Penrose is married to Vanessa Thomas, director of Academic Development at Cokethorpe School and former head of mathematics at Abingdon School,[30][31] with whom he has one son.[30] He has three sons from a previous marriage to American Joan Isabel Penrose (née Wedge), whom he married in 1959.[citation needed]
Religious views

During an interview with BBC Radio 4 on 25 September 2010, Penrose states, "I'm not a believer myself. I don't believe in established religions of any kind. I would say I'm an atheist", during a discussion on the Big Bang Theory.[32]

In the film A Brief History of Time, he 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."[33] He went on to explain that he believed our universe would end in a Big Crunch, a scenario cosmology has since found to be unlikely. Penrose's model regarding the ultimate fate of the universe is called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. It refers to the expansion of the universe, not a Big Crunch.[34]

Penrose is a patron of Humanists UK.[citation needed]
Awards and honours
Roger Penrose during a lecture

Penrose has been awarded many prizes for his contributions to science. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 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.[35] In the same year he was also awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Science) by the University of Bath[36], and became a member of Polish Academy of Sciences. 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.[37]

In 2005 Penrose was awarded an honorary doctorate by Warsaw University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and in 2006 by the University of York. In 2008 Penrose was awarded the Copley Medal. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK and one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society. In 2011, Penrose was awarded the Fonseca Prize by the University of Santiago de Compostela. In 2012, Penrose was awarded the Richard R. Ernst Medal by ETH Zürich for his contributions to science and strengthening the connection between science and society. In 2015 Penrose was awarded an honorary doctorate by CINVESTAV-IPN (Mexico).[citation needed]

In 2020, Penrose was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, a half-share also going to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.[38]
Works
Popular publications

The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The Laws of Physics (1989)
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994)
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004)
Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (2010)
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)

Co-authored

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

Academic books

Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity (1972, ISBN 0-89871-005-7)
Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 1, Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields (with Wolfgang Rindler, 1987) ISBN 0-521-33707-0 (paperback)
Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 2, Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry (with Wolfgang Rindler, 1988) (reprint), ISBN 0-521-34786-6 (paperback)

Foreword to other books

Foreword to “The Map and the Territory: Exploring the foundations of science, thought and reality” by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria. Published by Springer in "The Frontiers Collection", 2018.
Foreword to Beating the Odds: The Life and Times of E. A. Milne, written by Meg Weston Smith. Published by World Scientific Publishing Co in June 2013.
Foreword to "A Computable Universe" by Hector Zenil. Published by World Scientific Publishing Co in December 2012.
Foreword to Quantum Aspects of Life by Derek Abbott, Paul C. W. Davies, and Arun K. Pati. Published by Imperial College Press in 2008.
Foreword to Fearful Symmetry by Anthony Zee's. Published by Princeton University Press in 2007.

See also

Illumination problem
Quantum mind

Notes

Penrose and his father shared mathematical concepts with Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher which were incorporated into a lot of pieces, including Waterfall, which is based on the 'Penrose triangle', and Up and Down.

References

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Kumar, Manjit (15 October 2010). "Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose – review". The Guardian.
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R. Penrose (1979). "Singularities and Time-Asymmetry". In S. W. Hawking; W. Israel (eds.). General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey. Cambridge University Press. pp. 581–638.
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Criticism of the Lucas/Penrose argument that intelligence can not be entirely algorithmic:

MindPapers: 6.1b. Godelian arguments
References for Criticisms of the Gödelian Argument
Boolos, George, et al. 1990. An Open Peer Commentary on The Emperor's New Mind. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4) 655.
Davis, Martin 1993. How subtle is Gödel's theorem? More on Roger Penrose. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 611–612. Online version at Davis' faculty page at http://cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/davism/
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Krajewski, Stanislaw 2007. On Gödel's Theorem and Mechanism: Inconsistency or Unsoundness is Unavoidable in any Attempt to 'Out-Gödel' the Mechanist. Fundamenta Informaticae 81, 173–181. Reprinted in Topics in Logic, Philosophy and Foundations of Mathematics and Computer Science:In Recognition of Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk (2008), p. 173
LaForte, Geoffrey; Hayes, Patrick J.; Ford, Kenneth M. (1998). "Why Gödel's Theorem Cannot Refute Computationalism". Artificial Intelligence. 104 (1–2): 265–286. doi:10.1016/s0004-3702(98)00052-6.[permanent dead link]
Lewis, David K. 1969. Lucas against mechanism. Philosophy 44 231–233.
Putnam, Hilary 1995. Review of Shadows of the Mind. In Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 32, 370–373 (also see Putnam's less technical criticisms in his New York Times review)

Sources that indicate Penrose's argument is generally rejected:

Bringsford, S. and Xiao, H. 2000. A Refutation of Penrose's Gödelian Case Against Artificial Intelligence. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 12: 307–329. The authors write that it is "generally agreed" that Penrose "failed to destroy the computational conception of mind."
In an article at "King's College London – Department of Mathematics". Archived from the original on 25 January 2001. Retrieved 22 October 2010. L.J. Landau at the Mathematics Department of King's College London writes that "Penrose's argument, its basis and implications, is rejected by experts in the fields which it touches."

Sources that also note that different sources attack different points of the argument:

Princeton Philosophy professor John Burgess writes in On the Outside Looking In: A Caution about Conservativeness (published in Kurt Gödel: Essays for his Centennial, with the following comments found on pp. 131–132) that "the consensus view of logicians today seems to be that the Lucas–Penrose argument is fallacious, though as I have said elsewhere, there is at least this much to be said for Lucas and Penrose, that logicians are not unanimously agreed as to where precisely the fallacy in their argument lies. There are at least three points at which the argument may be attacked."
Nachum Dershowitz 2005. The Four Sons of Penrose, in Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR; Jamaica), G. Sutcliffe and Andrei Voronkov, eds., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3835, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 125–138.

Marvin Minsky. "Conscious Machines." Machinery of Consciousness, Proceedings, National Research Council of Canada, 75th Anniversary Symposium on Science in Society, June 1991.
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"Clarifying the Tubulin bit/qubit – Defending the Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR Model (Quantum Biology)". YouTube. 22 October 2010. Retrieved 13 August 2012.
Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff (4 July 1992). "Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory". Journal of Cosmology. Quantumconsciousness.org. Archived from the original on 16 June 2012. Retrieved 13 August 2012.
"Anirban Bandyopadhyay". Retrieved 22 February 2014.
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