Roger Penrose Quotes

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Roger Penrose

Profession : Physicist

Birth : August 8, 1931

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.

Roger Penrose

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

Roger Penrose

Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.

Roger Penrose

I was indeed very slow as a youngster.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.

Roger Penrose

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

Roger Penrose

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Roger Penrose

Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.

Roger Penrose

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

Roger Penrose

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.

Roger Penrose