Roger Penrose

Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Oxford

The Question of Physical Reality

In his series of lectures, Penrose explores consciousness and its scientific explanation. He argues that the consciousness experienced by human beings can be explained by science, but we lack the scientific tools. Disagreeing with those who claim that consciousness is utterly mysterious, as well as those who are convinced that ‘all thinking is computational’, he employs both a positive and negative approach to the problem. He specifies which research trajectories are dead-ends and moves toward new questions.

Biography

Roger Penrose was born on 8 August 1931 in Essex, England. A Nobel Laureate in Physics, he also won the Wolf Prize for the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems. Lecturer at Bedford College in 1956, he moved to St John’s College, Cambridge in 1957. Awarded NATO research fellowship, he joined the faculties of Princeton and Syracuse between 1959 and 1961. Briefly Research Associate at King’s College London, he was made Professor at Birkbeck College in 1964. He retired as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, achieving emeritus status in 1998.

Fellow of the Royal Society of London and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, he was also made Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. Knighted in 1994, he won the Science Book Prize in 1990 was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 2008. His notable works include Emperor’s New Mind (1989), The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking, 1996), The Road to Reality (2004), Cycles of Time (2010), and Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016).

Published/Archival Resources

Published as Shadows of the Mind.