Roger Penrose on quantum mechanics and consciousness | Full interview

my older brother, Oliver, who had worked at Cambridge doing postgraduate work there on many, um different body systems. area I worked in, but I met Dennis through my brother Oliver and we hit it off. Dennis and I particularly he was interested in cosmology and I had listened to Fred Hall's radio talks and I was baffled by them and this led Dennis to decide that he wanted me to change gears and work on cosmology. I never did it and I continued with what he was doing, yes, but I learned a lot of physics and I learned Dennis. he was very good and he knew physics and he knew the right people to talk to too, all the skills he had were very important to me, in a way it made me a basically good physicist, I mean, maybe that brings us to a ask.

How you approach the work you do, you've said in the past that you're quite a visual thinker. Views on Cosmology Views You Know Questions about Human Consciousness What is the unifying theme of being a visual thinker? How does that influence the way you do your job? It is certainly an important element of my thinking and remembering when I was in school. I kind of thought I was better than most of my colleagues at math and then I thought, well, I feel a little weird and when I go to university I'll find people who think like me, that wasn't true, was it, which I found it was there.

There were more different ways of thinking about mathematics than I had encountered before, but the main division was clearly whether one tended to think correctly visually or in terms of equations and I was clearly one of the fairly small fraction of the class who was definitely a visual person right, I actually didn't do very well in a sense because at University College they had this way of doing the mass where for the first two years you actually took the exam, the main exam at the end of the two years. It was a three-year course and the third year was to dedicate myself to your special topics.

Well now in my third year I majored in both geometry subjects, but when I found out later how well I did my geometry papers were not my best papers, the reason was that in algebra it is easy because you can. I don't know if it's the real answer, but it's kind of like you're always using one side of the brain instead of crossing from one to the other. I don't know if it's that simple. like that, but by doing the geometry work I can see how to solve the problem, then I have to translate it into words, write it into words and then do it again, so all this goes from one to another and from one to another. and I wrote slowly and I didn't finish the work while in algebra you can see so you don't have to change that way this is the problem that this is the answer and you just do like this and then I got better results in my algebra work than in Geometry, so you talked about some of the people you worked with and some of the people who taught you.

Yes, maybe now I could ask if there was anyone from the history of mathematics. or physics or science in general that you would have liked to know but never had the chance who would you choose well if we are talking about people from all of History Probably well, I don't speak Italian but I choose choose Galile if it weren't a and why is it that I don't know, I always had an i people say you're new and all that, but I mean, Maxwell would have been a good person too if he could have understood that his Scottish accent had a I think he has a strong accent, but Galileo I always had the feeling that I don't know if it was to what extent it was his problem with the church and all that and trying to fight against current opinions, but there were so many things that he understood and that Didn't I mean obvious things?

Now I think I know why people. One reason people didn't believe in the hood theory is because you don't feel it whistling through this great speed. Yes, yes, you're hanging from the chair, yes, yes, yes. and then Gallow points out no, no, you don't feel anything, yes, g and the equivalence principle. I like the one about the fireworks, he imagines the fireworks and they make this beautiful sphere of sparks and it falls and it remains a sphere as it falls. you can cancel gravity by falling freely. I mean these beautiful principles that Paul said were really so fundamental to physics and this, along with his fight against the authoritarian role of the church, and I think a lot of that was why he was my Hero in particular, well, Roger , I'm afraid we're going to have to end there, although I wish we didn't because I have a lot more questions than I had at the beginning, oh dear, but thank you very much, it was so much fun.