![]() His discovery of certain geometric forms known as “Penrose tiles”-an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns-led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography. He also invented “twistor theory,” a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. ![]() Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. ![]() No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius,” physicist Lee Smolin has said), we’d be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. ![]() Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious-and quite possibly crackpot-theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. ![]()
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