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“... James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who lived from 1831 to 1879, was a scientist of outstanding stature. Bearing his name, apart from the famous ‘demon’, is the set of fundamental equations that he discovered, governing the behaviour of electricity, magnetism and light. He also found, among many other things, the basic equation for the distribution of velocities of the molecules in a gas in equilibrium, and made other profound contributions to the statistical study of the molecules in a gas, relating to the Second Law of thermodynamics – which is what Maxwell’s ‘demon’ was all about ...”

“... Roger Penrose is one of the most creative and original mathematical physicists in Britain. This remarkable book is the result of many decades of reflection on our scientific understanding of the physical universe. We have discovered some major things about the nature of reality over the past three hundred years ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago ...”

“... for a ‘deeper physicalism’, whether it be Witless or a leading mathematical physicist like Roger Penrose has got to be right. Deep physicalists look to biology, chemistry and physics for depth. They are sceptics – and rightly – about the resources of both a priori philosophy of mind and computer science to explain nature and ...”

“... by means of precise measurements of observable quantities), and it will squirt out in others. Roger Penrose’s Cycles of Time takes one such imaginative leap. Now that cosmologists have determined the precise age of our observable universe, Penrose proposes that all the proliferating confusion since the big bang ...”

“... David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be ...”

“... relativity but which do not contain the initial singularity. Hawking, with the mathematician Roger Penrose, proved that all such attempts are futile. No matter how fancy the model, they demonstrated, the rules of general relativity dictate that a singularity always exists. Naturally enough, the proof that a singularity must exist led Hawking, along ...”

“... the best-known figures (and popularisers) of our day, such as Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg and Roger Penrose, not to mention all the proponents of superstring theory. But Horgan has also found some more fitting targets for his scorn. The expansion of science, the increasingly brutish struggle for survival that scientists must endure and the ...”

“... network’, and quantised versions of spin networks were introduced some thirty years ago by Roger Penrose to produce a geometry of ‘quantised directions’. They play a vital role in loop quantum gravity. Once again, the points are little chunks of space, but the edges of the network are associated with surfaces separating the chunks. When this ...”

“... reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the natural world is only a ‘shadow’ of a realm of eternal mathematical forms. The rationale for this otherwordly view appeared first in the Republic. Geometers, Plato observed, talk of perfectly ...”

“... partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.Or this from Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005):Although mathematical truths of various kinds had been surmised since ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, it was not until the great Greek philosophers Thales of ...”

“... In the book’s later essays attention centres on something else. In the Sixties, Hawking and Roger Penrose seemed to have shown that any universe beginning in a state of infinite density, a ‘singularity’, which is how our universe was thought to have begun, would necessarily begin unpredictably. All Theories of Everything would fail at the very ...”

“... be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play with it and the dogs piss on it. Roland Penrose – a friend of the Bloomsbury Group, close friend of the French Surrealists and a Surrealist painter himself – was, as the blurb to this collection of his notebooks and letters claims, the ideal commentator on Picasso’s goings-on, a Saint-Simon at ...”

“... the interest aroused by defunct Cambridge moles. The market for works even on imaginary moles like Roger Hollis shows no sign of slackening. The KGB, too, remembers the recruitment of the moles by its Comintern Intelligence subsidiary as one of its major triumphs. The literary attention lavished on the Cambridge moles has led to a curious loss of ...”

“... respect ‘the brute facts of immediate conscious experience’. All of them would sympathise with Roger Penrose’s conviction, as put forward in The Emperor’s New Mind, that computers can’t feel like anything, whereas we can, and that consciousness is not dependent upon the possession of a language in which to formulate beliefs. So they will find ...”