dmm | Celebrating Nobel Prize award to Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose received the "theoretical half" of this year physics award given for the discovery of black holes. His 1964-1965 paper proved that general relativity implies formation of black holes without any special symmetry assumptions. It's a very short note most of which is quite readable, see twitter.com/ComputingByArts/status/1313470385900445698 for links. (The "experimental part" of the award was given for the discovery of a supermassive object in the center of our galaxy made in 1990-s).

There were quite a bit of intersections with "Penrose school of thought" in my life. E.g. in the late nineties I met Andrew Hodges, the biographer of Alan Turing, who did his PhD "The description of mass within the theory of twistors" with Penrose being his advisor. Then I developed an interest in the theory of consciousness and studied Penrose writings on the possible links between consciousness and quantum gravity. I even wrote an essay on that in 2002, mostly disagreeing with his assertions, but at the same time finding a lot of inspiration in what he wrote: www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bukatin/reading_penrose.html

Later, his assertion that the correct quantum theory should be non-unitary was one of the key motivating factors in my intermittent studies of physics during the last decade. My only professional paper in physics (2017, Annales Henri Poincaré) www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bukatin/revisiting-eprl.html, is motivated by bringing two of his influential "minority viewpoints" together.

So, I am quite happy today about this award.