(* photo from wikipedia.com)
I was very pleased to learn that Sir Roger Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel prize for his 1964 paper showing that black holes are a natural and inescapable consequence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This Oxford mathematician is such a accomplished intellectual, and if you view him on YouTube, you will simply admire his down-to-earth and humble attitude in life.
I find myself in agreement with his views on cosmology. In college, I could never understand why infinity was treated with such disdain by mathematicians and physicists. Something was wrong with your calculations if infinity came into the picture. That was the textbook response which I was never comfortable with.
Listening to his ideas gave me much clarity. If you see him give lectures with his very colorful hand-drawn presentations, you will find that the explanations are very easy to grasp, and his arguments are very logical.
His contributions to geometry include the discovery of visually challenging Penrose triangles and lovely patterns of Penrose tiles. And while I don't even begin to understand his ideas on Twistor theory, I know that this is a possible tool to understand quantum gravity. His ideas on consciousness and the how biology has a quantum side has influenced my own thinking of how "I am" taps into infinite possibilities of a non-linear, non-causal moment.
Thank you, Sir Roger, for re-energizing my understand of the way things work!
