Early in his career, Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose inspired artist M.C. Escher to create Ascend and Descend, a visual illusion of a loop of stairs that seems to rise forever. . It remains an apt metaphor for Penrose’s relentless quest. During his long career, he worked with Stephen Hawking to uncover the secrets of the Big Bang, developed a quantum theory of consciousness with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, and predicted regions where gravitational fields are very strong. won the Nobel Prize in Physics. A singular point at the center of a so-called black hole where space-time itself collapses. Timeless, Penrose turns 91 this year, but he continues to innovate and plans to communicate with the universe in the future.
Michael Brooks: Around the beginning of your career in 1965, you used general relativity to first predict the existence of singularities like the one at the center of a black hole. How did you feel when you saw the first picture of a black hole more than half a century later?
Roger Penrose: To be honest, I was expecting these things by then, so it didn’t impress me much. [singularity] Theorem, it was a very strange situation.I was visiting Princeton to give a talk.Bob Dicke–a famous cosmologist and a very prominent man–came over and had my back. I remember slapping my hand and saying, , you showed general relativity wrong!” And that was a very common view. I suspect even Einstein probably had it…
