Roger Penrose Quotes

I'm not sure what Friedmann actually said, but he... produced a model in which the universe... started in a Big Bang... expanded to a maximum size... then would shrink down to a crunch, and then start all over again. ...There would be several Big Bangs and before each one, would be a collapsing phase of the universe...

[C]razy ideas are the sort of thing one needs when talking about the Big Bang. ...All the ideas I'm going to show you... are put forward by very... respectable cosmologists. It doesn't make the ideas any less crazy...

The idea of having an ambient space-time of some specific dimension seems to play less of a role of string theory than in conventional physics, and certainly less than the kind of role that I would myself feel comfortable with. It is particularly difficult to assess the functional freedom that is involved in a physical theory unless one has a clear idea of its actual space-time dimensionality.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation? How important are the quantum aspects of DNA molecules? Are cellular microtubules performing some essential quantum roles? Are the subtleties of quantum field theory important to biology? Shall we gain needed insights from the study of quantum toy models? Do we really need to move forward to radical new theories of physical reality, as I myself believe, before the more subtle issues of biology — most importantly conscious mentality — can be understood in physical terms? How relevant, indeed, is our present lack of understanding of physics at the quantum/classical boundary? Or is consciousness really “no big deal,” as has sometimes been expressed? It would be too optimistic to expect to find definitive answers to all these questions, at our present state of knowledge, but there is much scope for healthy debate...

Do not seek for reasons in the specific patterns of stars, or of other scattered arrangements of objects; look, instead, for a deeper universal order in the way that things behave.

There are two other words I do not understand — awareness and intelligence. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean? It is probably because I am a mathematician and mathematicians do not mind so much about that sort of thing. They do not need precise definitions of the things they are talking about, provided they can say something about the connections between them.

[T]here's a version of this a version of this idea which John Wheeler has promoted, which is that in each of these cycles, since nobody really knows what goes on at the crunch, bang stage... you can... invent any physics you like, and one idea... is to suggest that the... fundamental constants of nature might get changed every time you go through one of these cycles... [T]his might help to explain... puzzles that... the constants have to be just such and such in order that life should exist...[etc.] I always have trouble with many of these arguments. It's not at all clear whether you need them or not. They might be true but we don't know. It may be that these numbers are fixed and they might change through each cycle...[etc.] but our current physics... doesn't allow this kind of thing. These are singular states according to classical theory. Maybe if we had quantum gravity... one could imagine such a scheme...

What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? … The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being subject to whatever dynamical laws govern its actions, this must be strongly favourable to our very existence.

One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!

According to this view, the mind is always capable of this direct contact. But only a little may come through at a time. Mathematical discovery consists of broadening the area of contact. Because of the fact that mathematical truths are necessary truths, no actual 'information', in the technical sense, passes to the discoverer. All the information was there all the time. It was just a matter of putting things together and 'seeing' the answer! This is very much in accordance with Plato's own idea that (say mathematical) discovery is just a form of remembering! Indeed, I have often been struck by the similarity between just not being able to remember someone's name, and just not being able to find the right mathematical concept. In each case, the sought-for concept is in a sense already present in the mind, though this is a less usual form of words in the case of an undiscovered mathematical idea.

How is it that mathematical ideas can be communicated in this way? I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts. ... When one 'sees' a mathematical truth, one's consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it ('accessible via the intellect'). I have described this 'seeing' in relation to Gödel's theorem, but it is the essence of mathematical understanding. When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through this process of 'seeing'. (Indeed, often this act of perception is accompanied by words like 'Oh, I see'!) Since each can make contact with Plato's world directly, they can more readily communicate with each other than one might have expected. The mental images that each one has, when making this Platonic contact, might be rather different in each case, but communication is possible because each is directly in contact with the same externally existing Platonic world!

It's a very plausible thing now that the entropy should increase all the time... [T]hese volumes... are... enormously different in scale... I can't convey to you in the picture the absolute stupendous difference in the sizes of these volumes. So if you happen to find yourself in one of them, and you wiggle around, the next one you find yourself in will be overwhelmingly likely to be much much larger, and the entropy therefor goes up.