![]() Perhaps more accurately, the mathematician alive today - or even Penrose himself! - literally remembers his previous access to mathematical truths. Thus when Penrose uses the word “remembering”, what that actually means - within this context - is that a mathematician alive today must remember what his “soul” saw when it existed in another body in a “previous life”. The word “transmigration” is used because Plato is widely thought to have believed in the transmigration of the human soul from one body to another. ![]() This means that if we aren’t dealing with information (i.e., in the physicist’s sense) when it comes to mathematical truths, then another way of accounting for such truth must be found.Īn image Penrose himself uses in one of his books.Īs for Platonic transmigration specifically. In other words, it’s certainly not a word used by mathematicians in their everyday work. Penrose uses the word “information” in the same way that many physicists use it. ![]() It was just a matter of putting things together and ‘seeing’ the answer! This is very much in accordance with Plato’s own idea that (say mathematical) discovery is just a form of remembering!” “All the information was there all the time. Yet then we get what must be a (if there is such a word) transmigrational reason for this. “Because of the fact that mathematical truths are necessary truths, no actual ‘information’, in the technical sense, passes to the discoverer.” Penrose firstly explains the very particular nature of mathematical truths. And his answer includes an indirect reference to Plato’s theory of transmigration. Penrose himself provides an answer to that. But he was drawn to astrophysics by Dennis Sciama (who also was a doctoral advisor to Stephen Hawking).Specifically, readers may wonder how and why ( some) mathematicians (to use Penrose’s oft-used word) “see” mathematical truths - specifically of the Gödelian kind. Since Penrose was purely a mathematician, his work was really abstract in that sense. In fact, brilliance runs down their family: his grandfather was a renowned Irish artist, one of his brothers is a physicist himself and the other is a Chess grandmaster, his sister, a geneticist, has followed in her father's footsteps! Sir Penrose was most heavily inspired by his father, Lionel Penrose, who was a psychiatrist and a geneticist. ![]() Their friendship and collaboration were captured even in the movies: Hawking (2004) and Theory of Everything (2014). They both were the winners of Wolf Prize in 1988 for Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems (1965). While he had been working proactively to unravel the mysteries of the universe since the 50s, Roger Penrose came to a much wider public attention after publishing of A Brief History of Time in 1988. But the teacher realized if he gave me enough time, I would do well," the laureate recalled. "I was good at maths, yes, but I didn't necessarily do very well in my tests. ![]() He shares it with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. Cut to 2020, Penrose is the winner of Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |