Roger Penrose Quotes

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Roger Penrose

Profession : Physicist

Birth : August 8, 1931

Science and fun cannot be separated.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.

Roger Penrose

I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to problems.

Roger Penrose

The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Roger Penrose

Well I didn't actually see the Matrix but I've seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.

Roger Penrose

My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

I have certainly enjoyed puzzles since an early age, and things that look like impossible things are often particularly intriguing.

Roger Penrose

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.

Roger Penrose

Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.

Roger Penrose

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?

Roger Penrose