It's so sad to see old age claim a great mind.
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Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
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Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#12I admire Penrose greatly. And speaking as someone with a physics degree, I can say I've always had serious misgivings about the standard model and a lot of QED myself.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#13Not much content in this article. Read his books to get a feeling for the breadth and depth of his thought.
Are any of his book suitable as casual on-the-tram reading? Could you recommend one of his books? Thanks.
Depends how strong you are - I have a copy of "The Road to Reality" on my desk at work, but not sure I'd want to carry it about!
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#14Of course by this definition of wrong, Newtonian mechanics is wrong, which didn't stop me from taking a 400 level course on it.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#15Of course by this definition of wrong, Newtonian mechanics is wrong, which didn't stop me from taking a 400 level course on it.
Roger Penrose has fundamental thoughts about the physics and AI, not simply callling them wrong wrong in the sense of falsifibility..Read his books.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#16> And yet the 78-year-old Penrose—now an emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford—seems to live the humble life of a researcher just getting started in his career. His small office is cramped with the belongings of the six other professors with whom he shares it, and at the end of the day you might find him rushing off to pick up his 9-year-old son from school. Wonder if that's his kid?…
You might want to start by looking up the way sperm is being produced. It will help you clear the confusion with the link between the mother's age and birth defects.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#17Of course it's wrong; all scientific theories are provisional approximations, and the conflicts between quantum mechanics and general relativity are well known.
The hard part is proposing an alternative theory that fits all the known evidence. Quantum mechanics and general relativity both match a ton of observations; anything that is going to replace them will need to at least match the same set of evidence at least as well.
Put another way--when one theory replaces another, it must be fully contain the previous theory. General relativity, when applied to everyday human experience (i.e. not super fast, super big, super heavy), produces Newton's law of gravity.
Personally I think the next step in scientific understanding is in information theory. It has the possibility of unifying chaos theory, computer science, physics, and biology. I think this is how we'll develop an description of consciousness for example. We've already seen some preliminary reports that information theory can reproduce gravitation theory for instance.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#18It's so sad to see old age claim a great mind.
Care to elaborate?
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#19> And yet the 78-year-old Penrose—now an emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford—seems to live the humble life of a researcher just getting started in his career. His small office is cramped with the belongings of the six other professors with whom he shares it, and at the end of the day you might find him rushing off to pick up his 9-year-old son from school. Wonder if that's his kid?…
You might want to start by looking up the way sperm is being produced. It will help you clear the confusion with the link between the mother's age and birth defects.
Age of the father does have an effect, actually. http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/20030...
edit: Also, as someone who's had to use sperm donation to conceive...
> Wonder if that's his kid?
is pretty offensive. It's his kid, whether he's the genetic father or not.
Re: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
#20"Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?" "I was unbelievably slow... I always got lost... I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks."
Speaking as someone who still struggles with math, and was generally the dumbest kid in the most advanced classes, it's a huge relief to hear that someone as brilliant as Penrose experienced the same difficulties.