Top 62 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Penrose

My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.

When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.

As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there by chance.

In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

My younger brother ended up the British chess champion 10 times, a record.

The image of Stephen Hawking - who has died aged 76 - in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter.

Some people take the view that the universe is simply there, and it runs along - it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe.

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

My older brother is a distinguished theoretical physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society.

So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity.

Science and fun cannot be separated.

I have certainly enjoyed puzzles since an early age, and things that look like impossible things are often particularly intriguing.

Well I didn't actually see the Matrix but I've seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.

The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.

Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas.

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to problems.

Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

Quantum entanglement is a very intriguing issue, but it is not impossible.

My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.

A computer is a great device because it enables you to do anything which is automatic, anything that you don't need your understanding for. Understanding is outside a computer. It doesn't understand.

I was indeed very slow as a youngster.

Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.

Ordinary photons do have spin, they have a notion of helicity so they spin around their direction on motion.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

My father himself was a human geneticist who was recognized for demonstrating that older mothers tend to get more Down syndrome children, but he had lots of scientific interests.

Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.

It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment.

I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through the process of 'seeing'.

No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a non-comprehending parrot-like apparent competence--a duty and a duty alone--and no hint of magic or beauty of the subject might be allowed to come through.

Do not be afraid to skip equations (I do this frequently myself).

I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just somehow by chance.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense.

our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is simply there and it runs along-it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we have very little inkling of at the moment.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

Ambition, idly vain; revenge and malice swell her train.

If you didn’t have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn’t be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!