Words matter. These are the best Roger Penrose Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don’t need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn’t understand.
And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.
Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.
I was indeed very slow as a youngster.
The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.
I’m pretty tenacious when it comes to problems.
When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher’s fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.
Some people take the view that the universe is simply there, and it runs along – it’s a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe.
My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.
If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.
If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.
Might we… be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness – of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. – fit into such a computational picture?
Science and fun cannot be separated.
Well I didn’t actually see the Matrix but I’ve seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.
Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.
In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don’t know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.
The image of Stephen Hawking – who has died aged 76 – in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.
My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.
I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.
I have certainly enjoyed puzzles since an early age, and things that look like impossible things are often particularly intriguing.
Sometimes it’s the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.
So what I’m saying is why don’t we think about changing Schrodinger’s equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein’s general relativity.
But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there by chance.
Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.
My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.
If you didn’t have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn’t be morality but with consciousness that you have it.
