Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose Image source: Jerry Bauer

Image source:
Jerry Bauer

Sir Roger Penrose is a British mathematician, physicist and cosmologist who wrote The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

Quotes by Roger Penrose in Time One

To mathematicians … mathematics is not just a cultural activity that we ourselves have created, but it has a life of its own, and much of it finds an amazing harmony with the physical universe.

Mathematically driven fundamental physics.

We see that CP sends a particle’s zig into its antiparticle’s zag.

Roughly speaking [a black hole] is a region of Spacetime that has resulted from the inward gravitational collapse of material, where the gravitational attraction has become so strong that even light cannot escape.

This distance is considered to be of profound relevance in quantum gravity theory...

The … extra spatial dimensions are put on an essentially equal footing with those of ordinary space and time.

We have already had the example of the big-bang singularity in the remote past, which seems not to be avoidable. The “disaster” to physics occurred right at the beginning.

A true theory of quantum gravity should replace our present concept of Spacetime at a singularity. It should give a clear-cut way of talking about what we call a singularity in classical theory. It shouldn’t be simply a non-singular Spacetime, but something drastically different.

The impossibility of the causal communication that would be required for thermalization, in the standard model, is referred to as the horizon problem.

One of the mysterious aspects of the mass problem is the absurdly tiny size that the values that the masses of ordinary particles have when measured in absolute units. For example, the mass m(e) of the electron, in absolute units, is about m(e) = 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,043....

People often have strong emotional responses to questions of the origin of the universe―and sometimes these are either implicitly or explicitly related to religious preferences. This is not unnatural; for the issue is indeed that of creation of the entire world in which we live.

The Spacetime singularities lying at cores of black holes are among the known (or presumed) objects in the universe about which the most profound mysteries remain―and which our present-day theories are powerless to describe.

The cosmological constant has hovered in the background of cosmological theory ever since Einstein first put it forward, causing worry to some and solace to others.

As a way of appreciating the problem we can imagine the Creator trying to … start the universe off in a way that resembles what we know of it today. … If the Creator were to miss [the exact way needed] by just the tiniest amount … then an uninhabitable universe … would be the result, in which there is no … time directionality ….

The trouble with these monopoles is the lack of any indication of their actual existence.

And so the question is: Is it crazy? And, well, the answer is yes, but it does have relation to a lot of topics ….

Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons.