Roger Penrose quotes

General relativity is certainly a very beautiful theory, but how does one judge the elegance of physical theories generally? (Roger Penrose)
Understanding is, after all, what science is all about - and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.
Roger Penrose
It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!
Roger Penrose
What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? ... The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!
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. So we are not exactly computers.
Roger Penrose
There are two other words I do not understand - awareness and intelligence. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean? It is probably because I am a mathematician and mathematicians do not mind so much about that sort of thing. They do not need precise definitions of the things they are talking about, provided they can say something about the connections between them.
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
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
But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
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
Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. (Roger Penrose)
Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life.
Roger Penrose
Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation?
Roger Penrose
There are two other words I do not understand - awareness and intelligence.
Roger Penrose
Whereas originally the hopes for string theory, and its descendants, were that some kind of uniqueness would be arrived at, whereby the theory would supply mathematical explanations for the measured numbers of experimental physics, the string theorists were driven to find refugee in the strong anthropic argument in an attempt to narrow down an absolutely vast number of alternatives. In my own view, this a very sad and unhelpful place for a theory to find itself.
Roger Penrose
The idea of having an ambient space-time of some specific dimension seems to play less of a role of string theory than in conventional physics, and certainly less than the kind of role that I would myself feel comfortable with. It is particularly difficult to assess the functional freedom that is involved in a physical theory unless one has a clear idea of its actual space-time dimensionality.
Roger Penrose
What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being subject to whatever dynamical laws govern its actions, this must be strongly favourable to our very existence.
Roger Penrose
One is left with the uneasy feeling that even if supersymmetry is actually false, as a feature of nature, and that accordingly no supersymmetry partners are ever found by the LHC or by any later more powerful accelerator, then the conclusion that some supersymmetry proponents might come to would not be that supersymmetry is false for the actual particles of nature, but merely that the level of supersymmetry breaking must be greater even that the level reached at that moment, and that a new even more powerful machine would be required to observe it!
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
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
It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. (Roger Penrose)
How relevant, indeed, is our present lack of understanding of physics at the quantum/classical boundary? Or is consciousness really "no big deal,” as has sometimes been expressed? It would be too optimistic to expect to find definitive answers to all these questions, at our present state of knowledge, but there is much scope for healthy debate...
Roger Penrose
I was indeed very slow as a youngster.
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
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