Notis 89, 07-05-2010, Roger Penrose porträtteras i New Scientist 10 mars 2010. Han är matematikern som vill förstå de stora frågorna inkl. medvetandet, vill skriva om kosmologiteorin och kritiserar de tre stora huvudteorierna i modern fysik./GB
Sammanfattning: GB
Hans bok Road to Reality syns redan i inlednings-scenen av filmen Happy go lucky, men öppnas inte ens. Skribenten Michael Brooks nämner att Penrose faktiskt blir lite besviken – de borde åtminstone ha öppnat boken.
Men det finns ett bra skäl till att de inte öppnar boken. Då skulle filmen ha ”spårat ur”. Den är på mer än 1000 sidor och fylld med diagram och hemska ekvationer. Innehållet är närmast oläsligt för nästan alla. Happy go lucky är inte det.
Och ändå, det märkliga med Penrose, är att boken är en bästsäljare. Trots att boken är omöjligt framgångsrik i akademiska kretsar, så tycks Penrose ha den rätta ”touchen”. Detta är trots allt matematikern som ofta misstas för att vara fysiker, som 1965 visade matematiken för hur stjärnor kollapsar och bildar svarta hål, och mera nyligen använde Ed Witten, upphovsmannen till strängteorin, en annan av Penroses skapelser, twister-teorin för att försöka reducera strängteorins 11 dimensioner till mer hanterliga fyra.
Penrose, snart 80 år, har just lämnat in manus till sin nästa bok, där han skriver om (med betoning på om) kosmologi-teorin, Cycles of time: An extraordinary new view of the universe. I boken därefter, Fashion, faith and fantasy in the new physics kritiserar han den moderna fysiken. Strängteorin motsvaras av fashion och är något han inte tror på.
Få människor vågar kritisera och attackera de tre huvudteorierna i modern fysik, men Penrose roas uppenbarligen av att vara en ”vilde” och är smickrad av kritiken från sina vetenskapliga kolleger. Teoretikern Frank Wilczek vid Massachussets Institute of Technology anklagar Road to Reality för att ha många allvarliga fel, “deeply flawed”, och att Penrose hade struntat i sitt ansvar att svara på den akademiska kritiken, att gå in i detaljer och hantera experimentella fakta. “Galileo avfärdade detta briljant, men tiderna var enklare då”, sade Wilczek. Vad är då Penroses svar? “Jag anser att han ger mig en stor komplimang genom att på ett ofördelaktigt sätt jämföra mig med Galileo”.
Detta om Roger Penrose som vi tidigare nämnt som en av de mest framstående matematikerna idag och som samverkat med Stuart Hameroff i The Emperor’s new mind för att förstå medvetandet, se nyhetsbrevet 42 från maj 2008.
Roger Penrose: Non-stop cosmos, non-stop career
- 10 March 2010 by Michael Brooks
- Magazine issue 2751. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Image: Jerry Bauer/Brookhaven National Laboratory.
YOU’D have thought that Roger Penrose would be pleased to have his work immortalised in an Oscar-nominated film. Apparently not. After friends told him about his book’s cameo in Happy Go Lucky, Penrose sat down to watch it. He didn’t have to wait long: his book appears in the opening sequence. The lead character is browsing in a bookshop. She pulls Penrose’s Road to Reality from a shelf, takes a look at the title and, putting it straight back, says, ”Oh, we don’t want to go there!”
He is evidently disappointed by the treatment as, just for a moment, his bright, enthusiastic demeanour dims slightly. ”I thought she would have at least opened the book then closed it rapidly,” he says. ”But she didn’t even get that far.” There’s a good reason for that: having a look inside the book might have derailed the film. Road To Reality clocks in at more than 1000 pages and is replete with intricate diagrams and terrifying equations. Its contents are pretty much indecipherable to almost everyone on the planet. Happy Go Lucky it is not.
And yet – and here is the strange magic of Roger Penrose – it was a best-seller. Despite being impossibly successful in academia, Penrose seems to have the common touch. This is, after all, the mathematician who gave the artist M. C. Escher – also an esoteric yet popular figure – some of his best ideas. Penrose is also the mathematician most frequently mistaken for a physicist: in 1965 he produced the mathematics that showed how stars collapse to form black holes. More recently, Ed Witten, the founder of string theory, has been using another of Penrose’s creations – twistor theory – to try to reduce string theory’s 11 dimensions to a more manageable four.
Penrose, who is 80 next birthday, is still making incursions into physics. He has just handed his publisher the manuscript for his next book, a rewrite of cosmological theory. There are those, I hesitantly suggest, who say that mathematicians would normally have ceased being this productive long ago. ”Well,” he says with a grin, ”I can’t help that, can I?”
Where it will end is anyone’s guess, but Cycles of Time: An extraordinary new view of the universe is the next stop. The ideas in the book came to him five years ago, when he was worrying about the state of the universe. According to the standard view, dark energy will lead the universe into an eternal accelerating expansion. Every bit of matter will eventually lose contact with every other bit. ”It all just seemed unbelievably boring to me,” Penrose says.
Penrose has no time for strings. ”My main objection is all those extra dimensions, which don’t make any sense,” he says. Witten aside, says Penrose, string theorists are not facing up to their problems. ”I don’t see string theory converging on anything. In fact, it’s diverging: it has got wilder and wilder.”
That’s part of the reason why, after Cycles of Time, he will publish Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics, a critique of modern physics. String theory provides the ”fashion”, but there are other targets too.
The ”faith” is the idea that quantum mechanics is fundamental to the universe. Not that Penrose wants to take anything away from quantum theory. It is, he says, spectacularly successful in describing what happens on subatomic scales. But that doesn’t mean it’s the final answer to describing every aspect of reality. What’s more, he says, it has opened the floodgates for every flaky idea under the sun. ”Quantum mechanics is so successful and so non-intuitive that people think they can have any old theory they like and it could be perfectly true,” he says.
Few people would dare to attack the three main arms of modern physics in one hefty swipe, but Penrose obviously enjoys his status as a maverick, and is flattered by criticism from his scientific colleagues. Theorist Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Road to Reality ”deeply flawed”, saying that Penrose had sidestepped his responsibility to respond to his academic critics, go into details, or deal with experimental facts. ”Galileo pulled this off brilliantly, but times were much simpler then,” Wilczek said. Penrose’s response? ”I consider he paid me an enormous compliment by comparing me unfavourably with Galileo.”
Profile
Roger Penrose is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. His contributions to mathematics include showing that classical general relativity breaks down in the centre of a black hole, and twistor theory, which addresses the geometry of space-time.