The Origins Podcast: Roger Penrose

The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

Lawrence M. Krauss

Science, Natural Sciences, Physics

4.4 • 592 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2022

⏱️ 170 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Summary: Roger Penrose and I discussed his life and work in science, mathematics, art and beyond, including the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his recent highly controversial proposal regarding the beginning and end of the Universe.

To get this episode into your RSS feed, please click the button below from your phone:

Roger Penrose, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his 1965 theoretical demonstration that black holes are an inevitable consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity, something that hadn’t been widely accepted at that time, is known to his colleagues as a remarkable mathematical physicist, whose way of picturing things has changed the way we now picture many things. His use of what are called conformal diagrams, now called Penrose diagrams, allow us to intuitively picture processes in curved space, particularly around black holes in ways we couldn’t do otherwise. He also developed something called Penrose tiles, fill a two dimensional plane in a way that was previously thought to be impossible. He both inspired, and was inspired by the famous Dutch artist M. C. Escher, in his ‘impossible’ drawings. Most recently Roger has proposed an alternative picture of the evolution of the Universe called Cyclic Conformal Cosmology, which connects the distant past of the Universe with the far future. It is controversial, and few others have accepted his picture at this time. He and I spent almost 3 hours discussing all of these things, and also his early inspirations as a young man, the nature of mathematics and physics, and much more. I am extremely happy to release this episode with Roger Penrose as the first Substack-hosted episode of The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss. I hope you enjoy it, and all the future episodes to come.

Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast.
0:12.7	Roger Penrose is known to the public as the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics,
0:18.9	which he shared with several astronomers who who discovered a black
0:26.3	hole at the center of our galaxy or at least demonstrated its existence by look at
0:32.0	the motion of stars and we've talked to one of the mandragesse Roger shared the Nobel Prize for showing 50 years earlier
0:42.3	that black holes in fact were an inevitable consequence of General Raltudi, something which really
0:48.3	hadn't been accepted at the time because black holes are so weird. But Roger is known to physicists for many other things as a remarkable mathematician
0:59.0	who's developed techniques that have really changed the way we think of general relativity,
1:04.0	so-called Penrose diagrams.
1:07.0	He's also discovered a fascinating aspect of nature called Penrose Tiles, which he and I talk a lot about,
1:14.6	which in some ways was sparked or sparked his interest in the art of Escher.
1:21.6	And we had a wonderful discussion about very early experience he had as a young man talking to Escher and actually
1:30.6	helping him in some sense with some of his images, some of his impossible images. Roger has
1:39.8	recently promoted an idea in cosmology called conformal cyclic cosmology, which frankly,
1:47.0	as I discussed in our dialogue, is a controversial idea which really hasn't been widely accepted
1:55.0	in the community beyond himself and his colleagues. And I have several concerns and questions about it. He and I had a
2:02.7	discussion. We talked about his early life and science, his experiences having to do with general
2:08.2	relativity, and what led him to his current work, which we discuss at length in the latter
2:15.4	part of the podcast. I hope that this will provide a new glimpse into the way scientists can debate ideas,
2:23.3	hopefully, respectfully and fruitfully, and how ideas at the forefront of science can remain controversial,
2:30.3	and how most important, as we discussed at the end, how scientists should be not happy to be wrong,
2:38.0	but certainly willing to be wrong and proclaim their wrong and change their minds,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lawrence M. Krauss, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Lawrence M. Krauss and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.