Early in his career, mathematician Roger Penrose, from the University of Oxford, inspired artist M. C. Escher to create a visual illusion of a staircase called “Ascending and Descending”. This serves as a metaphor for Penrose’s inquiring mind. Throughout his career, he collaborated with Stephen Hawking to uncover the secrets of the big bang, developed a quantum theory of consciousness with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, and received the Nobel Prize in physics for his prediction of black hole singularities. At 91 years old, Penrose continues to innovate and even plans to communicate with future universes.
Michael Brooks: In 1965, at the start of your career, you used general relativity to predict the existence of singularities in black holes. How did you feel when you saw the first photograph of a black hole more than half a century later?
Roger Penrose: Honestly, it didn’t make much of an impression on me because I was already expecting these things by then. However, when I first proved the singularity theorem, it was quite a curious situation. I was visiting Princeton to give a talk, and I remember Bob Dicke, a well-known cosmologist, slapped me on the back and said, “You’ve done it, you’ve shown general relativity is wrong!” That was a common view at the time. I suspect even Einstein would have had that view…
