Sir Roger Penrose: Bridging The Worlds Of Mind, Mathematics, And Mysticism

Sir Roger Penrose, a name synonymous with genius, has tirelessly pursued the secrets of the universe with the fervour of a true renaissance seer. His intellectual contributions span a breathtaking range, from the intricate beauty of Penrose tilings to the vast expanse of cosmology, and even the enigmatic depths of human consciousness.

Mathematics, his chosen tongue, serves as the key to unlocking the mysteries of existence, to glimpsing the proverbial mind of God. Yet, beyond the towering intellect and the manifold genius lies a man, a human being navigating the complexities of life.

It shows the trajectory of the development of a mind like that of Penrose, right from his childhood when he was fascinated by geometry to the unfolding of his genius and the price he constantly had to pay — a loneliness that shall accompany him forever.

Early on Penrose as a child tricks his nanny Stella who insists that he should eat the greens making them into a semicircle to make her believe he had eaten them. Trivial. But here is a connection Penrose would later make between the realm of the physical, the psychological and the mathematical geometry. But when he and his family used to listen to astrophysicist Fred Hoyle’s lectures on BBC radio, Barss writes:

Just opposite this page is the light cone diagram made famous in public consciousness through Stephen Hawking's ‘A Brief History of Time.’ However, the passage written through various interviews and interactions with Penrose clearly reveals an epiphanic experience that Penrose underwent in understanding science through such pop-science lectures.

Communicating science not as an explanatory answer but as a wonder-triggering process to a child’s mind can take it to soar into very high altitudes — whether it is science, art or mysticism. Of all persons, Richard Dawkins, the ace atheist points this out in his book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ where he says thus:

These chapters of the book — that deal with the formative influences on Penrose — are thus important for our pedagogy framers.

He was pursuing his PhD and was totally left alone amidst all the mathematical talk that left him bewildered. He exited the entire building and chanced into ‘an exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam’ where he had an encounter with the lithographs of Dutch artist M C Escher. That should have been the Arjuna-meet-Krishna moment for Penrose. Barss writes:

Along with these, Penrose also confronts Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem which shows ‘how every logical system generates statements that are true but that cannot be proven within that system.’ This gave him a glimpse of the problem of consciousness says Barss.  

Meanwhile, Soviet physicists Lifshitz, Khalatnikov, and Belinsky studying the same Quasar data declared that singularity as envisaged by Penrose was more a mathematical conjecture than a reality, they argued that in any situation approaching a singularity, the chaotic nature of massive bodies and gravitational fields would not form a real singularity. The scientific community at large was inclined towards Lifshitz et al. Penrose intuitively knew that singularity was real and Soviet physicists should have made a mistake. He immersed himself in the problem.

Thus, was born his 1965 paper ‘Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities.’ Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, it was only three pages long and was more a geometric approach than algebraic. The paper was resisted and debated because the general scientific consensus then favoured Lifshitz et al. It was for this paper mainly that Penrose would be awarded the Nobel Prize, 55 years after its publication!

The Soviet physicists while opposing Penrose externally, started re-reading their own paper. They found that it contained an error. Lifshitz wrote a paper confessing to the error. They did not want someone else pointing it out. The paper had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union with name of the author removed. Then it was published in the West.

Then there is his collaboration with Stuart Hameroff and their theory of ‘orchestrated objective reduction’ of consciousness. It was a collaboration that made many of Penrose’s academic friends very worried. But Penrose stood by his collaboration with Hameroff even though he did not agree with all his worldview. Barss writes:

The book reveals a lifelong obsession Penrose seems to have with finding a very human muse and the way he projects it on women who get close to him with disastrous results. This may actually open up an important domain for a challenging Jungian study of how genius works and the underlying expressions of Anima or Animus.

But was it just a fantasy? Here one should remember that Penrose was a man of 'incredible intuition.' Barss quotes his early colleague Wolfgang Rindler saying this about this faculty of Penrose:

Indian readers will at once connect this quality of Penrose with that of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Penrose was born eleven years after Ramanujan died. But Ramanujan had his divine Muse — Namagiri Thayaar — which is essentially integrated inside the self — within.

Coming from a Christian and secular environment, Penrose had to search for the muse outside, projecting it onto every woman who showed the capacity to understand him or collaborate with him, as said often with miserable consequences for both.

On the whole, the book is an exciting journey into the inner workings of a fellow human being who is a genius gifted to provide us with a vision of the most guarded mysteries of the universe through the language of mathematics which in turn attained poetic beauty of the highest order.

He connected the three realms of the universe: the physical realm, from which emerged the mental or psychological inner universe, and from that, the mathematical universe. However, only a small fraction of the rules of this mathematical universe gave rise to the physical universe. Thus, to him, the three realms are interconnected.

He has the ability to move through all three realms, and this book takes us on an inspiring journey, offering glimpses of what he must have experienced. Even these glimpses are profoundly humbling and elevating.