Talk:Roger Penrose/Archive 2

Penrose changes his mind about Big bang??
Heard this in HardTalk in BBC.Penrose said that he doesnt believe that the bigbang was the initial state of the universe,i.e that was when time started.There is a big bang,and after a loong time,the density becomes so low that another big bang starts...His theory is something like that.He said .."At the time of Big bang,acc to second law of thermodynamics...it should have been a very orderly state(he put up a few numbers quantifying this) and why was it??" or something...I dont know about big bang except the very basics,so i cant confirm anything,or reproduce what his arguements are accurately. Then he said that he believes that if we can expand his theory,it can give clues abt human consciousness etc which could be instrumental in building a human-like AI system.He said "I only argued that computers cant do it(reproducing human intelligence inc consciousness).Physics will be able to do something about it".--Sahodaran 06:15, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems to be a very important development. I suggest reading Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics in which he rejects the Copenhagen Interpretation. Gordon Pask pointed out in his process/product complementarity principle that waves produce particles so there's no need for some crazy kind dual coexistence.

Mead says this has kept physics in the Dark Ages for the last 70 years. Angular momentum considerations unify force theories so if mass turns into waves, as Penrose suggests, we get a scale free oscillatory cosmolgy and can throw out most of the balderdash and clap trap that has been experimentally unverified. We have to look at accelerator experiments solely as superposition of waves experiments and their products as solitons, at best- if not spurious.

Mead and the STM guys basically say wave mechanics works. Quantum Theory does not. Penrose may be moving into that camp.

There's an interview with Mead in American Spectator 2001 which no one seems to have taken seriously-yet. If matter evaporates- turns into waves -at low temperature Penrose wins and we have to rewrite the textbooks.--Nick Green 02:34, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

This is the BBC News24 video streamed interview with Penrose on his scale free and mass free Cosmolgy conjecture.--Nick Green 02:12, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link. Its a shame BBC still has streaming quality about 5 years out of date (people still use Real Media??) Remy B 02:23, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Why-Did-Our-Universe-Begin-Roger-Penrose-/441 Penrose states he didn't change his mind, he just has an alternative idea that could work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.227.66.211 (talk) 18:37, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Penrose invented Twistor Theory?
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but in The Road to Reality, he states that Twistor Theory was largely contributions of other people towards one of his earlier theories. I'll try to track down the exact quote later, but The Road to Reality is quite a large book. If anyone else is interested in trying, I believe it was somewhere in the first four chapters (maybe the one on hyperbolic geometry?)
 * I've read the first 200 pages or so and dont remember that bit, although it is such heavy reading I could easily have missed it. Remy B 23:44, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It seems most of the internet is against me, and given that I read the first few chapters during finals week, I'll attribute it to a stress-induced halucination. 67.160.30.127 06:04, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Penrose is the inventor of twistor theory, but after its invention a lot of other people contribute to twistor theory. There is nothing surprizing in this. The twistor theory is still under construction. The most useful entry on the subject for mathematicians is R. Penrose, The Central Programme of Twistor Theory, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 1999; 10: 581-611. If somebody who understands this heavy math needs the pdf of the paper, I can send it by mail. Danko Georgiev MD 11:31, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Family life?
I heard of him being gay, is that true?!
 * I dont personally know (or care). I dont really think its a notable thing to place in the article, even if it is true and there are sources for it. By the way, you can sign off your comments on talk pages by typing this at the end of your text: ~ Remy B 06:24, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

No. He is married to (Lady) Vanessa Penrose, a Labour party activist forty years his junior. They have a young son. He also has three sons by a previous marriage.

"Three sons from first marriage, to an American" Does anyone else find this description a little absurd? Do we not know who his first wife is? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.192.139.100 (talk) 04:37, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Book advertisement

 * The book site 321.co.uk linked external link of interviews and lectures to their book shop. Removed, and if they try again I will report them.86.141.95.72 00:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC) [Kreso Bilan]

Claim
In his 2004 book, Roger Penrose claims rashly that his work is "...Complete...". It has been said before that some scientific law is exact or self-evident, only for it to turn out to be untrue. The un-splittable atom, inverse-square gravity, the impossibility of making gold from base metal, all are examples.

Non-sense
"Roger Penrose is well-known for his 1974 rediscovery of quasi-crystalline tiling, a medieval Islamic architectural technique[1], which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane aperiodically".

Roger Penrose knew the proof for the existence of infinite aperiodic tilings and searched to simplify their construction; what he proposed came to be known as 'the Penrose tiling'. Soon it was proved that it produced Bragg diffraction, and in the '80s it became a model for the newly dicovered structures later known as quasicrystals. As it appears medieval artisans in Middle East had hit upon a decorative technique which could produce eventually an infinite non repeating motif equivalent to a Penrose tiling.

Does this have to be mentioned in a brief and dense article?

The quoted redaction is pure nonsense and it is out of place. Reverted it but left something in order to avoid offending someone.al 19:49, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

British Humanist
Is he a member of the British Humanist Association?

-A KID FROM THE EAST


 * According to the British Humanist Association site it would appear that he is, http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/contentviewarticle.asp?article=1348 Davy p 23:15, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Why are "weak censorship hypothesis" and "strong censorship hypothesis" in bold?
I noticed in the career section that "weak censorship hypothesis" and "strong censorship hypothesis" are bolded. I'm wondering why.

It seems odd, since the original mention of the cosmic censorship hypothesis is not in bold. The bolded terms draw they eye away from the original mention of the term. At first I thought there was no link to the cencorship hypothesis page, because the bolded terms aren't linked.

Is there some kind of wiki policy/guideline on bolding text? - DonkeyKong64 (Mathematician in training) 13:41, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

This is the first edit that included the text in question: - DonkeyKong64 (Mathematician in training) 13:46, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Peter Ells
I plan to start an article on Peter Ells, who has expanded on the work of Penrose and others to build a theory of naturalistic, libertarian free will based on panpsychism. He has also critiqued Dennett's arguments. His paper can be found here: [cms.brookes.ac.uk/staff/PeterElls/FreeWill/NaturalisticFreeWill.rtf]. Can someone help me get his biographical info? Thanks --- Amit 15:08, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Hello. I'm Peter Ells. Amit kindly emailed me about the above. I am only an amateur enthusiast about the philosophy of consciousness. My work is unpublished and so is not valid as an article in Wikipedia. Thanks, Peter. Peter Ells (talk) 14:23, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Run on sentence
The following sentence is unclear. I do not know enough about the subject in question to correct it myself.

"He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is a deterministic system that for the most part simply executes algorithms, as a billiard table where billiard balls act as message carriers and their interactions act as logical decisions." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.64.25.17 (talk) 13:26, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Religion?
Is Roger Penrose really a Christian? States himself as adhearing to no religious doctrine on this page here:



I read road to reality, didn't sound very Christian to me! Change of mind perhaps? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.32.126.12 (talk) 22:12, 10 June 2008 (UTC)


 * What on Earth does that mean? Mathematics texts are not supposed to sound religious. They are based on logic and religions are based on faith. And sign your posts. CharlesTheBold (talk) 03:52, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

He's definitely not a religious person, but neither is he an atheist. He believes there is another reality out there that we haven't grasped yet. I would call him a "weak agnostic". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.96.110.56 (talk) 19:32, 28 March 2009 (UTC)


 * If anything, he might be termed a pantheist.  Dr Dec  ( Talk )    15:35, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

This section of the article has quite possibly been written by an American Hard Atheist - the "However" linking the first sentence to the remainder (and implying that Penrose's statement that there may be a "deeper purpose" to the universe is somehow "religious" in intent) is very telling. There is nothing in Penrose's science or personal statements that admits of religion, and the fact that his philosophy of consciousness is a thorn in the side of Hard Atheists, is their problem, and should not be allowed to pollute a Wikipedia article.88.105.238.11 (talk) 22:05, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Orch-OR link?
Any reason why there is no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orch-OR link? pls fix and delete my comment.

Aeons before the Big Bang
Added some info in external links to documents and lectures on his new theory. The original lecture (held at the Newton Institute) is also available on youtube in better quality. Spam bot didn't allow the URL, so maybe someone knows how to insert that hyperlink. (??) —85.178.89.19 (talk) 16:19, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Picture and caption about the vast majority
User Tesseract2 has added a picture of a human brain with a superimposed drawing of logical circuits, plus a caption stating that "Despite Penrose's contributions, the vast majority of thinkers in related fields say that he has so far failed to support the claim that consciousness could not be explained by existing scientific principles."

Now, well... I don't like it! So it should go away!

Seriously, I don't think the picture adds anything to the article. It's like the pictures they put all the time in magazines: if you have an article about schools, put a picture of children working in a school. It adds nothing at all to the article, because you already know what children working in a school look like; it just visually frames the article as being about schools. Wasted space. I hate it.

As for the caption: I think it is an overstatement. How do we know what the vast majority of thinkers in related fields (what fields?) say? Many don't even know about Penrose. It's true that Penrose's ideas are not mainstream, but I don't think we need to call in the "vast majority" of the universe to overkill him.

--David Olivier (talk) 09:04, 22 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Your arguments that (a)You don't like it and (b)You don't like things for good reasons were both successful! I didn't like the picture really either... So hopefully my more recent edits are getting closer to a relevant image, with a useful summary of the text.- Tesseract2 (talk) 13:13, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Template
Created Template:Roger Penrose so that the articles on his books dont have "See also" links at the bottom which dont explain what is being linked to. Books by him are now in the template. other "see also" titles should be very rare, otherwise we are doing the reader's research for them. why not "see also" to newton, einstein, hawking, or AI authors? He may in fact argue that his books, in some fashion, are connected to everything else in the universe, so where do we draw the line?Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:47, 7 November 2011 (UTC)