Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Roger Penrose

At Mind Matters News: Nobelist Roger Penrose talks about his impossible triangle

Penrose attempts a minimalist position when defending the reality of both mathematics and the mind in a world where many believe that only the physical exists. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Chalmers and Penrose clash over “conscious computers”

Holloway: There are hard, practical reasons why computers cannot understand concepts like “infinity” and “truth” and therefore cannot be conscious. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in

Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH--the so-called "Hawking radiation". And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn't make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed. Read More ›

Physicist Rob Sheldon checks out astrophysicist Ethan Siegel for ridiculing Nobelist Roger Penrose

Sheldon: The politicization of science evidently started before Ethan's graduate schooling, as Hoyle and his post-doc Chandra Wickramasinghe tell in their biographical writings. Read More ›

Human consciousness may not be computable

Robert J. Marks looks at a recent theory: One issue to be aware of is this: AI is performed by computers and computers are entirely algorithmic. That is to say, they are constrained to obey a set of operations written by a computer programmer. Mathematics is algorithmically constructed, based on logic and foundational axioms. And physics is built algorithmically on foundational laws. In this sense, common naturalistic phenomena are largely algorithmic. They operate according to the logic of mathematics and the laws of physics. Penrose wondered, is anything in nature nonalgorithmic? He points to the collapse of a quantum mechanical wave function into a deterministic state. Such quantum effects can be found in the microtubules found in the brain. Penrose Read More ›

And now black holes can be ghosts…

From previous universe: In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv—apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB sky— Penrose, along with State University of New York Maritime College mathematician Daniel An and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argued that those traces are visible in existing data from the CMB. Daniel An explained how these traces form and survive from one eon to the next. “If the universe goes on and on and the black Read More ›

How Roger Penrose proposes that the universe can be eternal

For all practical purposes. From the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog BackRe(Action) According to Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through an infinite series of “aeons,” each of which starts with a phase resembling a big bang, then forming galactic structures as usual, then cooling down as stars die. In the end the only thing that’s left are evaporating black holes and thinly dispersed radiation. Penrose then conjectures a slight change to particle physics that allows him to attach the end of one aeon to the beginning of another, and everything starts anew with the next bang. This match between one aeon’s end and another’s beginning necessitates the introduction of a new Read More ›