Sir Roger Penrose - From Cosmology to Consciousness - Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

[Music] well Roger it's very nice to talk to you in this strange interview format as someone I've talked to for 42 years a long time so we're rehearsing all sorts of things that have come up during that period and I suppose my thought goes immediately to time I mean you're everything you've done seems to be like defeating time in one way or another being defeated by it normal well I don't think so I think you've defeated it more than this be for whatever exam I don't know whether you remember my office where I used to have a clock that went backwards well that would be that would be a good motif if we wanted one in the background I think but certainly we're thinking about second law of thermodynamics and the mystery of time direction and our consciousness and our awareness of the past and so we can only talk about the past unfortunately it's a greater disadvantage we have but I was thinking perhaps he would like to say something about how your first mathematical work in the perhaps in the Cambridge Spanish I'm sure it started earlier but at Cambridge in the 1950s it seems to me that so much came out of that and there are still some puzzles for you then which are still very much around now well I started off by doing algebraic geometry in Cambridge as a graduate student at st. John's College and I think I I was misled into thinking that algebraic geometry was geometrical and I very soon learnt that it was basically algebra where geometry was the thing that I enjoyed and found I could do most easily so one thing I did was to develop a notation which will Hodge was my supervisor originally and Michael attea was one of the people contempor the time which is rather terrifying because I thought all graduate students were like that and it took me a while to learn that there was something particular about Michael but I used to I developed a notation initially sort of to handle Hodges lectures because he gave lectures on differential geometry and he had these indices all over the blackboard and it was not the easiest his were not the easiest lectures to follow and partly stimulated by that I developed this notation where tensors could be represented with blobs with arms and legs and you can stick them together to form contractions and so on so it converted geometric algebraic problems to do with tensors into pictures which I could understand much more easily well that's a whole motif which I was going to ask you about later in fact and I'm ways in which you develop ways of seeing things on the page and in one's mind that's quite different from the usual way of formal notation but also it just strikes me that I mean you didn't follow the kind of algebraic geometry of the notes more abstract kind that's that's been so enormous since that period I mean there were tremendous things going on with the abstraction of mathematics for you you kept so a geometric viewpoint which must been very unfashionable really in the Cambridge of that period I think I was very unfashionable although if you look my thesis there's not a single diagram in it but it was all done using I mean there were diagrams because I did the algebra by making these tensor pictures and like drawing lines and having notations for symmetries ations and scoots image relations and things and how you manipulated these things and although it was very algebraic what I was doing it was done in a very geometrical way but I think this one of the big things that was important in how things developed with me was I developed this general formalism of tensors which went beyond the normal idea and you could include things like negative dimensional tensors and these turned out to have relevance to spin in quantum mechanics but one of the things was I was very mystified by spinners because they seemed to be fractional things where you had a square root of a vector or something like that and I couldn't understand how you could do that and Dennis Sharma who was a great friend of mine when I was in Cambridge quite early on he sort of we've got made good friends and he was a cosmologists who was very much following the Cambridge line at that time which was the steady state model of cosmology was Bondi and gold and Hoyle were all there these being the originators of this idea and Dennis was a strong follower of it which I found very interesting and intriguing and philosophically a satisfying picture where the universe sort of was there all the time it didn't have a beginning and the expansion of the universe was compensated by a new material which was created continually which I had problems with later because it was hard to see how you could combine it with the rules of general relativity and given the choice between general relativity in the steady state model I would go with general relativity but my friendship with Dennis was very important to me because I learned a lot of physics from him you see I was doing pure mathematics as a graduate student but there were at least three courses of lectures I went to there are a lot of pure courses I went to which were important to him he I remember Philip halls courses Sean Sean Wiley he gave a very nice course on topology and things like that and but then I also went to other things which were not really evident the anything to do with what my research project was one of these being a very beautifully done course by Bondi home in Bondi on cosmology general relativity and cosmology which was done with great flare and and a wonderful course and another course equally brilliant in a completely different way was Dirac's course on quantum mechanics which was he was all everything very logical and very beautifully organized many of my colleagues said oh well that's just the same as this book you see so I said well I hadn't read this book so the elegant sufferer of what he done came out in this lecture but it was also important to me because for some reason I don't know whether Denis had been talking to him or or something I'm not quite sure but but there was a it was a course on standard quantum mechanics which was the first term then the next term was to be on quantum field theory and in this course he took one week off to talk about two component spinners and I had been trying to understand from reading various incomprehensible books about two components minutes and they made no sense to me at all but these I think it's probably two lectures Dirac gave and they were just perfect it became completely clear the whole subject which is a bit ironic because people think of Dirac as a four components spin a man but he in fact understood not only understood about two component spinners but he developed his the higher spin versions of his own equation using this formula zhim and it seemed to me it was absolutely the right way to do it so you've already mentioned I mean I'm thinking that when I was at Cambridge it was very much divided pure and applied and people hardly talk to each other at all I mean they in my time they're in separate departments and you had as an undergraduate you were supposed to choose which you were and you just stuck to it there was a real cultural block there but you just ignored that oh that's I think I ignored yes well well Denis was all the time trying to get me interested in physics he I had a conversation earlier before I went to Cambridge about the steady-state wonderful lectures given by Fred Hoyle which which there were some issues which I couldn't quite make sense of and and I got talking to Dennis who was a friend of my brothers I bother Oliver who was at Cambridge a couple of or several years before me and so we struck up a friendship with Dennis at that point so he was trying to get me to do physics all the time and get me interested in physics and maybe convert my subject to physics which I never did because there were too many and there was too much in the mathematics that I was very much involved with an interested in tensor systems in general geometry ideas so on and a lot of these ideas which I should have learnt then you see one of them in particular was about sheaf Co homology because well they used to call them stacks in those days the theory of stacks you see I think stack still means something but at that time is what became what called Chiefs sheaves I suppose and I was baffled by the whole thing and it was only many many years later when when Michel Lotito made all these things clear but at the time I realised there were things that would have been very useful to me later on had I paid adequate attention then what did your was it William Hodge think of your studying all these different things that he does he aware I mean I just think too many graduate students now they'd be horrified by the idea of studying or completely different courses not getting going on publishing the papers of the right number and though it's different then but there was also extrange thing about you see I started off with Hodge and well there were two other students one of them gave up quite early another one was Michael huskin who went through and did his PhD but then went into history of science and the other one was Michael attea and they were all like that more or less and it was quite because Hodge suggested at one point well if he sensed I was a little unhappy with the very algebraic problem that he'd set me and so he said well you might like to sitting in one of the classes of another school so that was I didn't understand a single word of what was going on but that was Michael Michael too you see and I think later became very good friends with him there was another course so I went to when I was at Cambridge at the same sort of time as when I went to de rax and Bondi's course this was a course by a logician called Steen and I went to that which I also found it were very influential and what happened to me later on because I learnt about girls theorem I'd vaguely heard about it before and I find it rather disturbing you say I think I would have prior to going to Cambridge believe you know we're all computers and that's what thinking is computation or something I'm mainly because I couldn't think of anything else and girl or ceramide vaguely heard of and it was sort of touted to something which was showed there were things in mathematics that you couldn't prove and then when I went to this teens course it made quite clear that although you couldn't prove them using some particular system the mere fact that you trusted that system is something you could give give reliable derive reliable conclusions from that mere belief in the system enabled you to transcend the system and you could find statements which had to be true on the basis of your trust in the system even though they you couldn't prove it using the system so I found that very striking did you even at that time have some inkling that there should be some connection with the physical description of the brain and of matter generally I think I did but it wasn't very well formulated you see I think I probably did as a result of Steen's course come to the view because I learned about Turing machines as well that was all part of the course so Turing machines and girdles theorem and the fact therefore because of this understanding that seems to transcend any particular formal system that there must be something else going on in the brain which is not of a computational character and I probably learned from Dirac's course on quad Kanaks there again there's a bit of an irony because I remember the first lecture I went to he had this little piece of chalk I think he broke the piece of talking to or something he's talking about superpositions you know in quantum mechanics what if we could do one thing or another then you could have super positions of the two and so he said you could have a superposition of a piece of chalk over here and over here and my mind wandered at that point you see and he I remember him saying something about energy or something but but I couldn't understand why this was an explanation of anything I thought it must be because my mind had wandered at that point that I'd missed the point but it worried me ever since and I think I did formulates the idea that there was a big gap in our understanding of the world in quantum mechanics specifically and that there probably was some link between that and and what must be going on in our conscious thinking but it was pretty vague and it was only very much later when I heard a radio talk when Marvin Minsky and therebut redken were talking from a very computationally point of view and I could see well from that perspective then you I see why they're taking that view but it seemed to me ridiculous to extrapolate to that degree and this was what made me realize that I had something to say on this subject which seemed to be different from what other people had been saying so I had had the idea that in the very remote future I would write some book about trying to get people excited about mathematics and physics but it didn't really have a focus but then this thing said well hush I'll try and describe my ideas about what's going on in the mind I suppose we should just in case people may not be so familiar with the time scale what we're talking about because this really only what you're talking about now was the work which came out in the emperor's new mind I'm left ahead yeah and in fact you started publishing on this in the mid-80s and the book was what yes and browsers remind people that the cosmological pictures you were studying it from Dennis Sharma I mean it was hardly hardly anything was known at all then really it was just the really comparatively local expansion of the neighboring galaxies and well I think people regarded cosmology as just philosophy or something I mean there was no reason to believe one thing or another and it became but it was the microwave background but that was only later that was much later so when you were introduced to it it was a very it was not exactly a clean slate because the Hubble expansion was known but nothing like the detail that's right today I'm afraid I am jumping around here you're quite right but that's just interesting because you took up subjects who wish they and would have been comparatively low proof and the relativity as the subject was not I was I mean Hermann Bondi put the new modern ideas Von D was a big influence yes he gave some radio talks were extremely good very clear and he he certainly influenced me a lot now and put the subject but it was a very physical way ahead of talking about things but it was extremely clear I think I learned a lot also from other colleagues Felix Pirani in particular there's somebody who mathematics of relativity from so I think that's where we can where you were able to put two of these otherwise completely disparate pieces knowledge together which is understanding of the null geometry and the spinor representation being relevant to general relativity and how that was that's that's something which came out of the out of geometry and relativity that yes I think of the order in which these things I was certainly I got interested in in the physics and you see Denis was very he was he knew everything that was going on in the world of physics particularly cosmology and astrophysics and that kind of thing but he also was interested in the foundations and we used to he used to drive we sometimes would go to a Stratford and go to plays you see and he would drive in his fancy car you see at great speed and as you went round the corners at this great speed he was seen now that's the action of the fixed stars you see because he had this marks principle idea was very strong with him that somehow what determined the local inertia was the distant stars and the galaxies with a sort of marquee an idea and and if you were wrote though rotated Newton's rotating bucket you see it's the reason it bulges at the edges because the influence of the stars are sort of pulling it round you see and we used to have these discussions as we would drive to or from Stratford and the idea would be well suppose the stars or the galaxies got rid of them one by one they all what would happen to inertia you see and so I tended to take this to an extreme so where you there's nothing left at the car you see well then would you feel anything you know that you just the inertia would be according to this view fixed by the car itself so I'd go down say well expose you just had two electrons you see then how do they know how they're spinning or one electron you see well one electron does it know which way it's spinning or if you have two or if you have several and so I started thinking about individual spin systems where you had no notion of direction it was only what the total spin was when they came together and you bring another one in there's a spin go up or down what are the rules you see and so I developed this idea of spin networks from basically from that idea I hadn't realized that the spin networks or as early as that and therefore related to your well the negative dimensional tensor and what's the diagram calculus that you'd worked out that's right that all that okay me on very early yes and then you see the connection also between the dimensionality so this was the thing that intrigued me very much was how you have with spin spin they take an electron or spin 1/2 particle then it's it's only got two ways it can spin you see but how many have two ways when it's got the whole sphere of directions well that's because of quantum mechanics and spin up and spin and all the other spins are combinations of them and then you see the array of the complex combinations of two states which is really a sphere and that's fear gives you the directions in space well there you have an intimate relationship between the three dimensionality of space and the complex numbers of quantum mechanics and so this kind of struck me as something deep in a way and then also when I started thinking more about thee I can't quite think of the order of this relativity picture where you now have the the light cone and you have the directions along the light cone or if you like the sky celestial sphere and you have the different directions on the different points on the sphere and then again it becomes useful to represent those points on the the Riemann sphere the complex plane together with infinity and that sphere is physically a very natural way of thinking about the directions in space yeah yes absolutely you go out in dark night and you see what we see the past anyway you see if you a little bit of it but as in space of course you have a better picture but somehow thinking of that as as the complex fear it was a very crucial way of nailing down the space-time dimensionality through space and one time and only then do you get a light cone which is a complex structure so you headphone directs two spinners which is completely contrary to most yeah most eminent one people would think that he was weighted to force force spin and the gammas and everything and yet that gave you an insight from from quantum mechanics into space-time and relativity yeah she's again not the direction one would naturally think of no I just I tended to go my own way I think I mean I was always you see when I was at school I remember particularly in Canada I was in Canada during the war yes and I was extremely slow and you need my mathematics papers I wouldn't get very good marks and one in fact once I got moved down a class because I was very bad at doing mental arithmetic but there was a teacher we had a great insightful teacher mr. stern net I think he was called and he realized that if I was given enough time I might do rather well in the test you see so he said all right we're going to have a test today it's the whole usually we just this this this period and you're supposed to finish this but I'm gonna let you have any as long as you like so I would be working away the next period would be a play period and people be outside enjoying themselves I'd be still plugging away occasionally I go on into the one after that still working away at this test and then I would do very well I would get you know 998 percent what's something on and it was a huge difference I think the thing was that I was not good at remembering things you see you know Frank didn't have tables or whatever it happened to be but if I had enough information so I could work it out each time you see so I think it was something I always tried to work these things out for myself of course that's not much good if you're trying to do at school exam but later on it kind of served served its purpose so I had to think this through these things on my own terms rather than learning about them from a book or whatever it was so I would guess that if you put forward these I mean put the particle physicists of that period wouldn't have being very interested in in whether is into spinners or no oh the relationship of SL to C and this kind of thing but and that your direction went into into into relativity but really you had a great deal that was coming from quantum mechanics as yes from classical geometry yes and the background is that is that quantum mechanics certainly was was a big influence on me I mean like I don't know exactly when I firmly thought well some he's got to be a dun dun about quantum mechanics that you have to change the rules at some level I think I felt that pretty early but I couldn't put a date to that but nevertheless the idea that the quantum features very fundamentally at the level of small things yes what and what point also it's just understanding the importance of null coordinates and the light rate and the conformal structure and the metric is secondary and the observation on the moving sphere in 1959 was it's just such a it's just a two-page yes working out of that idea destroys a lot of talk about people being squashed up when they move in and there was that sir and that was and that was not well I write comes in your publications with fairly it's it was before I you see I went to America this was probably and I went to America in 59 I guess me was in 1958 I went to the conference on general 15 gravitation in Rome or near Paris and that was shortly after I had been thinking about spinners and relativity yeah I where Dennis Dennis Sharma again you see he was very keen on getting people together who he thought might have something to say to each other and I think I'm a variety 55 was the first general relativity conference and 58 must have been the second is that I mean it's very early days yes the first one was from these Chapel Hill I can't remember there were there were two and I can't remember scald the first one I see Chapel Hill was one and Paris was the second it wouldn't be a second comparatively small body of people there were a lot of people I got to know well and knew them later on dead Neumann lots of people it was a big influence on me but it was important to me because well I just let me just backtrack a little bit it would have been 57 probably I'm not quite sure of the date but Dennis persuaded me to go down to King's College London David Finklestein was giving a talk about the Swart solution and getting rid of the singularity or some he said well that sounds interesting it I wasn't working on general relativity really then see I was thinking about these spinners and so on and he gave a talk where he showed how you could extend the Schwarzschild solution to within the horizon but we now call horizon the people used to think of the Schwarz of singularity and he did it in one past in the future and then showed how to stick weaves together into what was now called the cross call extension and this made a big impression on me but it was chronic kind of curious because Finkelstein at that time was his main interest of generality in mind was in spinners and playing around things in the small and quantum mechanics and so on and we in a certain sense or combinatorial I was doing spin networks and so I explained to him about spin networks and he from then on went on and did combinatorial things and I picked up and did general relativity after that so we sort of swapped roles but I can see how about word had such little sorts of things he needs the now coordinates to do that well it was it was you see there was the history of it was sort of like this I meant a lecture and I was very impressed by how you got rid of this so-called structural singularity but you still have this thing out here in the middle yes so I thought somehow IQ pushed it from one place but it's still there so I began to think is there a general argument to show that singularities have to be there no I had no mechanism no nothing to try and tackle this problem the only thing I had which I'd been studying with a spinners so I thought well let me just see how spinners work to try and describe relativity so then I did that and I looked at the viral thing and and it all kind of came out so beautifully and the viol curvature being totally symmetric spin there and all this stuff this was and no one else has done that felix Pirani did things was that it was Lou Witten it was his father who had I didn't know about it Felix fear I only mentioned there was this paper by luetin where he had actually applied and looked at the inverse there were some things which weren't quite right in the paper I looked at it and corrected that and and did some other things that he hadn't liked the canonical representation into four principal directions and so on and all that stuff but somehow it all fitted together in a much more beautiful way than I had thought and it was as much that as as David Finkelstein his lecture I think which dragged me into into studying general service in a serious way I'd been interested in it before that I first interests curiously enough I first encounter with general relativity apart from my brother Oliver it's vaguely describing it to me was a little bit by Schrodinger it's base time structure which is really nice little book apart from the last chapter he goes on to it and fund the ideas but most of it was a very beautiful explanation of the tensor calculus and so on so I learned about that even for I went to Cambridge but then picking up things from Felix Bharani and and Dennis and and so I and then I went to the Royal Mark conference which was in 58 yes that's what you say I think and Dennis very generously he was one of the he was one of the principal speakers at this meeting he said well look I've got an hour's talk given bit I've got you have half my time I thought that was extremely generous of him so I gave my little talk on the on the spinners I figured with an hour and half an hour whether it's 40 40 minutes and I had 20 minutes I cannot remember it was a rather hurried little talk on showing how you just translate these tensor quantities into spinners and how beautifully it fit in with what did the ideas of general tivity that was actually motivated by what became the singularity theorems and yeah mid-sixties that was before you'd actually I mean this was before we really started on yes well I published the thing on that on the spinners yes which is 1960 but then it was more I went to Princeton I in two years well a year and a half in Princeton and Syracuse and I got influenced by John Wheeler I think on the idea that you have what may have been a little after that yes I think it was that they there was a conference in Warsaw where I that's where I started talking about conformal infinity and I think then in the in the mid 60s early 60s it became clear from the observations by Martin Schmidt that there were those were the first observations of quasars and I remember wheeler getting very excited about this and saying look this tells us there are objects which are really down to the scale of their shrapnel singularity before we always used to think oh well this shot shot so-called singularity this tiny little thing wouldn't any real that relevance the physical whatsoever but here it became clear that there was something funny was going on where you really had things which varied they were they must be sufficiently big because they're this energetic and they must be sufficiently small because they varied within weeks or days of weeks or something so they can't be too big and therefore they must be of the sort of size or that their Schwarzschild radius was that was what we now call a black hole and named black hole and emerged at that stage but wheeler was very interested in this idea about where the singularities were generic or not we're aware of the I mean are you aware of Oppenheimer's yes 39 yes well this was something that we were very made a big point you see with all the various papers that Oppenheimer was involved in particularly the Oppenheimer schneider paper ways just before the war where you have this collapse very artificial material sort of dusts and very artificial and it was exactly symmetrical and and then he had this model thick collapsing to a point but it was regarded by many people as highly artificial these idealizations wouldn't apply generally particularly because the Russians these were licious and collecting seemed to have proved that the singularities were a very special thing and they would not occur generally now I'd sort of seen a little bit about their proof and I couldn't imagine you could really prove something like this the way they were doing it so I started trying to think about this and in other ways geometrically kind of visualizing what it would be like inside collapsing star and trying to convincing myself it had to be a non-local argument that you wouldn't be able to prove anything from purely local considerations and then there was this idea about what's called a trapped surface which came about in a rather curious way well I was talking to yeah I have a Robinson I was at at that time I was in backbit College in London and I've a robe ensign who was a friend of mine I learned a lot of things about spinners and self deal things and so on which became important later in Twista theory and he was talking about something completely different politics probably and and we came to a street and across the street and conversation stopped then and then we got to the other side he started talking again you see and then when he went he went around home you see when Murray was going now I remember thinking at the end of this a feeling of elation and I couldn't pinpoint it now why am I feeling like this you see so I went back to all the things I've been thinking of during the day and then I remembered crossing the street and when I was halfway across the street a thought occurred to me and this was evidently this characterization of of a collapse what we call a trapped surface that this characterization which was a global condition and it would tells you that this star has reached a point of no return and so when that I realized that idea I then developed a pretty well the same day ruff-ruff doubt a proof that you had to get singularities but the that's misleading in the sense that the techniques were things that I had developed a bit earlier partly although never published as an argument going back to the steady state level because I was interested in steady state but I also interested in general relativity and I was trying to see is it possible that you can have something like steady state consistent with general relativity if it was in exactly symmetrical case you could see that big problems of energy but if it's irregular maybe you get away with it but then I developed an Ag mix it with these cones and focusing and so on to realize that there wouldn't help that you would still be in trouble I never published that but there was an argument in the which another thing in the Royal Society I had to try and prove something about asymptotics which I wasted a lot of time but I developed these techniques I thought I was wasting a lot of time develop the techniques which became just what were needed in the case of the collapsing those ideas in differential geometry in topology which you needed there were developed for the problem of the 50s yes state which was where she was blast I mean soon as the Big Bang was just the things for black holes which were a fantasy in this in the 50s yeah but so very far from fantasy no I mean no that's right well it was purely as how that how the thing about because the first I went a lot of the early boredom called the Texas conferences on relativistic astrophysics and I went to the first one which was a lot of the stuff about the the quasars these these things that Mars Martin Schmidt had seen and wheeler was so excited about and so on and and Roy Kerr at that point had found that the a solution known as the Kerr solution which is can be interpreted as a rotating black hole it wasn't totally clear at that stage that you could interpret it that way but this did become clear and knowledge of these things was important and in what I did at that stage they show that you had to get singularities and extremely general segments so it's it's no no symmetry assumed no particular equations of stage you didn't have to assume the dust that that Oppenheimer and Schneider had you could have quite general material as long as you didn't violate energy energy positivity here so the obvious thing in the late sixties was to go completely into the new realm of general relativity it's opened up by modern astronomy and cosmology and was it you do II started thinking about elementary particle physics the same time yes yes it was well yeah they were definitely the same time but you see these were things that were nagging at me for a long time I just couldn't I have to give an angle but cooking a lot of credit here because on my earlier trip to the this is the first trip to the States where I I went after two first to work with John wheeler in Princeton and then I went to Syracuse and I shared an office with angle that shocking and he kept on talking about conformal Maps and the importance of conformal transformations and how Maxwell's equations were invariant and for what reason I wasn't sure at that time but another thing he stressed was the importance in quantum field theory of the notion of positive frequency and these things stuck with me and they were very important in the development of Twister theory partly the conformal staff to to represent radiation by squashing infinity down making a conformal boundary just base time that was one of the ideas but the idea of the positive frequency was very crucial to tricity I remember I made a a new I wanted some kind of geometry which was complex in some fundamental way but it was really trying to describe the world as we know it as well and had to try and bring quantum theory in and I made a huge table with all sorts of topics and arrows going between them and things like this and and but the angle burt thing about the pasta frequency which nobody in in quantum field theory tends to stress that at that time it was not i think they think of it like physics this is very very analysis yes so then it's sort of trivial it's just plus or not I think it was the combination and yes of the flurry analysis and the fact that if conformal things were important for analysis is not appropriate because it's not even formally variant nevertheless the fact that you're choosing positive frequency as opposed to negative is confirming event and this idea of extending so you have your Riemann sphere again you've got your function on the equator a real valued function that's the real numbers on the equator and then if you can extend your function into the holomorphic Li into the north or the south this gives you positive or negative frequency now for that's such a beautiful idea can that be extended in some global way to the whole of space time and this was nagging me you see and I wanted something where you see if you complexify you don't have splitting into two halves you see this Riemann sphere you complexify that circle you've got the Riemann sphere that's the real part splits it into two halves and ticket are they positive and the negative frequencies or maybe I think it's negative and positive but never mind and so I kept thinking well what about Minkowski space what are you complexify it doesn't spit anything into two halves you see but then I remember being driven from it I think was shortly after the Kennedy assassination I was in America you seen that and in in Austin Texas and the family is respective families this was the Rindler Santosh parts had gone down to San Antonio I can't remember where it was exactly and in the car back I was pitch-dark was driving me and he's not very talkative so it's a lot of silence you see and I began thinking about this thing that I've a Robinson had about how you can take a light ray and somehow push it into the complex and then you get these funny solutions of the Maxwell equations which are non singular and twisting and so I tried to understand what was going on and then I realized that these things about the Clifford parallels I can't quite remember there I realized that the yes that the these solutions of the Maxwell equations must have been Nile directions along with these Clifford parallels I vaguely knew I knew about the Clifford perils already but the fact that this is what you got I realize this must be what you got this configuration so this the twisting of the lines around these tour in nested tour I and that configuration which I sort of known about from the Clifford parallels when I got home I just translated all into two components spinners and it kind of dropped out and that was twister twister theory and and then you see you had the two the thing was split into two half sort of metal you heard that the real the space of the light rays and then sort of mild complexification into these two halves the right-handed ones and the left-handed ones and that this was the analog of the splitting of the Riemann sphere into two halves it took a long time before realizing how it really was that so it was because it needed the comala G but it's so striking I mean now the twister variables are used by physicists but they sends a call it's a half Fourier transform and I think it's a completely linear way really nothing like this geometric characterization and yet we're going to get away from doing everything in Mycoskie space we really need to have some picture of what a particle is an antiparticle is and so on which doesn't depend on I mean I don't know if you we may be coming on to this really is there are things of that period which you're worried about which i think is still very open well it's very interesting I mean and as you know we had this group developing ideas of twister theory and these meetings every Friday pretty well and discussions fairly broad ranging discussions on fares topics and then you almost single-handedly developed these ideas are twisted diagrams and and and I will always admired you how much you you know you you felt this was a thing to do you stuck with it well they were your diagrams but I kept them alive until it wasn't signed with other people's I was I'm thinking this you've always wondered about what a wavefunction really really is yes and a lot of people don't worry about this they just write down the formalism of quantum mechanics yes linear and so forth but do you like things that we can see in a sense I mean I think yeah seeing is is very important to all you do whether it's the notation or just the business of light or the action of consciousness and seeing the truth of her girdle statement I mean this is something very important and I feel you don't think we we can see you on a wave function is that what I always worried about people saying oh well quantum mechanics just tell his pictures are no use any more sort of fancy just calculate them and forget about the pictures but I never was happy with that I wouldn't wanted to try and picture anything I could certainly with spin ideas were spin and so on but sure seem to be very important to develop the geometrical ideas as far as one could but there are certain very odd things about quantum mechanics well I think as I wrote in one of my book that shadows is a mind like their quantum mechanics has two kinds of mystery I think people tend to confuse them so the ones I call the the Zen mysteries which are the puzzle mysteries which are things which are true of the world and baffling that you can understand them I mean we it's not quite the way we used to think the world was like spin doesn't behave like a little cricket ball or something spinning around a well-defined axis is something much more subtle going on but it can be understood and it's consistent and it makes sense it makes beautiful sense often and there are there's the ex mysteries ex ones were the ones which were paradoxes and like Schrodinger's cat so you have quantum mechanics tells you without a very difficult experiment although not so nice on the cat you couldn't put it into a superposition of being dead and alive and so Schrodinger was basically showing or look this is what my shredding shredding this equation is telling you you could have is this cat which is dead and alive at the same time that's nonsense you don't see cats like that so although he never quite put it like that it seemed to me he was saying look there's something missing there's something in the theory which is not adequate and Einstein felt the same way and Dirac is in that because that's one reason I was interested to hear it but he was very he got more you could see on the web there are some lectures there anyway explicitly says this and III I have trouble finding the original quotes that because I know there are some quotes which he quite clearly says that the theory well yes it says in the Bohr Einstein debates he says well you know Bohr is normally thought of to have one these and I think maybe time will tell what Einstein perhaps did you get that skepticism from him no right no that wasn't a feature of what he was a very reluctant I think to express his in their opinions you very hard I had a curious experience once I was asked by the philosophy department at Boston University see philosophers like to have you know talk given by somebody and then there will be somebody to contradicting or sizing you see so he they asked me if I'd like do this you see who was I supposed to contradict well I think they'd heard about Dirac commented about how projective geometry had been useful in his thinking you see so they had him and rationally I said oh well okay I'll make some comment come you can't refute that because that's absolutely yes so he gave this talk she directed his talk and it wasn't very elegantly put during talk on projective geometry just some projects don't know physics no read no influence on his own thinking or anything it was just a talk on projective geometry so I'm afraid I slightly made well I think some of the owners were hoping you might reveal some of you in a thinking and then I gave a little talk since took a leaf out of his book and gave a little talk on Twista theory did my version of - geometry physics but that was slightly curious but well projective geometry had a big influence on me because oh yes actually that's backtracking a bit but but that really would have seen an old-fashioned subject in there ya know time it's something that Victorian yes I mean that people just dropped out of the syllabus by that time I think almost all unit here I just caught it you see we I went to when I was at University College London that's where did my undergraduate work there was in fact geometry was quite a big part of the syllabus you had applied mathematics you had sort of algebra no you prime mathematics analysis and then algebra and geometry I think it's like that but the geometry was significant part of that and there was a no guy whole ren TL ren who was a very great purist he started off you know there were just two axioms you know anything there's a line through any two points and if there's a line through these two points and through these and it meets their the needs to meet here thank you how much could you prove from that you see occasionally you need another axiom of it later on but but that kind of like know everybody I hated it but I rather liked the course you see I I thought it was very nice to see these kind of very primitive ideas developing into a geometry so there was some projective geometry which I learnt there which was quite important my own understandings here well you brought it back endurance contest yes and I was just thinking that it did come from their own experience in a way it was quite unusual yes so it was just got caught the tail end of it well I think there was an there was another gentleman who came in after but then it kind of faded away and got an almost removed from the syllabus completely and then it swung back a bit but but it was considered to be unfashionable and even when you did what was called algebraic geometry there was very little geometry and sense and what you could actually see in it so I didn't take to that too well although I tried to put as much in as I could but a lot of it was translated out when I translated my diagrams into into some incomprehensible notation which is I'm afraid what my thesis in that ended a path but the geometry was always important to me but it sort of meant more into the physics like geometry of quantum mechanics and relativity [Music] well Roger we've talked about how in the early days you started thinking about cosmology when people really knew absolutely nothing about cosmology at all there was hardly anything about the Stars that people would see now it's completely different there's absolutely absolutely gigantic amounts of data huge numbers of people poring over than every way how but you I think would feel as some quite fundamental things haven't really been answered at all I mean the role of the cosmological constant and then the origin of the tell me how you think things stand it well I do I suppose I must think about things somewhat differently because the problems that I've regarded as important over the years same scant attention these days well I've always been very puzzled by the second law of thermodynamics and the direction of time and all that and well there's various things it has to do with which may be are offshoots and one way or another like I'm on conscious perception relates to it but let's leave that aside for the moment the main thing which is a pretty obvious thing in a way but which is almost totally ignored now you see we're supposed to have this Big Bang origin of the universe and if entropy which is this measure of disorder is increasing with time it is what the second law tells us that means well okay it's understandable if I have a glass of water and I splash it it goes on the ground and you don't see the opposite that's entropy increasing you don't see the entropy decreasing but if you state this the other way around it's the same statement but just phrased in the opposite direction it means as you go back in time things get more and more and more ordered entropy goes down and down and down and where do you get where you get to this thing called the Big Bang and what's the best piece of evidence for the big bang well it's this microwave back do you see this radiation coming from all directions and this microwave background has one very important characteristic features notice it's very early on by the Cobie mission that you see thermal equilibrium you see this beautiful spectrum the Planck spectrum which indicates what you're looking at was in thermal equilibrium what's not equilibrium real because it was expanding but taking that into account and that expansion is not an entropy increasing expansion it's adiabatic expansion and Tolman the American cosmologists and physicists fully appreciated that you were looking at something which was in effect thermal equilibrium now that is on the face of it a paradox because surely when you go back in time if the entropy is going down and down and down it ought to be pretty small yet what you see is something telling you the entropy was at its maximum now it's never been said you know this is a great puzzle who says that well I've been saying but hardly anybody else not only that that they don't say that but they said this is what you expect in the standard cosmological models if you take completely random initial state you that's what you get and that's what you expect and yeah sure and that when they saw and Penzias and Wilson saw this thing dickie and people would say yeah well that's what we expected to see it's just the flash of the Big Bang you're seeing well what about the entropy how can that be well the I think this is a virally here because people tried to solve the answer on equations for cosmology and how do you solve them well you assume symmetry because otherwise the equation is just too hard to solve and Friedman did this he just assume you have a very homogeneous isotropic universe and now he was able to solve the equations Einstein was rather unhappy with his equations initially but nevertheless he did it right and sunny agreed with his mathematics but he thought he thought there must be something wrong somewhere but he's curious that that it's these models we have being what people have used ever since and since they use them it's just think this is cosmology and the fact that this is such an incredible assumption it doesn't hit people and this is where the entropy is low it's because all the ripples in the space-time that could have been there weren't there and they were initially assumed not to be there because it's the only way they could solve the equations but then you get used to the idea they're not there because those are the models but why weren't they there all these degrees of freedoms in the gravitational free field could have been there and to see how extraordinary this assumption is you think of a collapsing universe which has all the irregularities which might be their forms black holes these black holes congeal the entropy goes soaring up incredibly now that we have this bekenstein Hawking formula for the entropy in a black hole we now can make an estimate for how big that entropy is and how improbable the universe that we actually find ourselves to be in don't see you might have had that that puzzle even before the big and microwave background was discovered because that was attracted you to the Hoyle steady-state model as a way of getting out of the Freedman it's truly that thought about the UC I did think about the second law issue very much in connection with the steady-state model but there yeah it was something that I've learned about but then it seemed that the problem could be solved with the picture that they have with the hydrogen being uniformly distributed and then as it collapse lumps into stars that gives you an increase in the energy it's the right idea because but it's with the wrong model you see you have a model with the hydrogen produced uniformly and as it clumps it produces these hotspots it's great the action of gravity yeah gravity reaches hot spots and the Sun is a hot spot in the dark sky and it's not the Sun is it's hot the Sun is bright gives us our life on the earth because yes so whole sky was the same temperatures of Sun it because totally useless it's the combination of the hot Sun and the dark sky and that's where the low entropy resides and that comes about through gravity so it was this crucial thing which yeah already when I was thinking about steady-state I must have been thinking about that although I can't quite pinpoint that but that's true I did I did worry about second law then but the fact that the Hajin was dennis sciama think about that too because that's the sort of thing which I don't remember yes you should have but well I wrote this article for the the Hawking Hawking Israel with the editors the Einstein centenary volume and this was I put this long article on about the study about the second law of thermodynamics I don't think I had discussed all those things with Dennis beforehand but but I didn't have a particular idea that I had subsequently yes I didn't know how to characterize the particular way in which the Big Bang was special and that really comes out of studying the conformal structure I mean that's that's one thing yes yes in the earlier days he wouldn't've I think as much importance to as you as well there were a number of things I noticed very early on which played very important roles later on but I couldn't figure out early see one of them is this fact just just a curious fact in mathematics we're talking about four dimensions and we're talking about space-time for one time free space and we're talking about the via curvature none of our curvatures are conformal curvature so if you have a metric you don't know what the scale of things is but you know what angles are or if you know what the like turns out that's another way of saying the same thing that conformal structure tells you that the light comes out but you don't know big from small then the characterization of the curvature is in this vial curvature Weyl and the barrel curvature is a measure of the conformal curvature but it's also in a sense a measure of the gravitational degrees of freedom now in connection with twisters but not specifically twisters I think is thinking about it before that because I was looking at how you write in spinners the zero rest mass field equations for all the different spins it was specifically Dirac and though I had it all though when he did the zero mass case for some reason he did in a different way which I never fully understood but if you followed up Dirac's earlier paper and did it for zero mass that's what you get you have this particular way of writing the the different spins and the Maxwell equations you've just got two indices dip and then you be the graviton equation if you like you've got four indices it's just the same equation neutrino equation that's just one if you consider it massless and so the the gravitational field is two propagates and there's this wave equation I had this interesting like slightly anecdotal things Dirac never talked much but I was a fellow at John's College at the same time his direct and they member at one point asking him whether I could have a chat with him about some of his stuff you see because I knew he was interested in quantizing done relativity and so he agreed and so he went off and had this and I started describing this spin of stuff to him and I had this equation this wave equation for me for the for the spin to feel you seen I said sighs wondered if this might have anything to do with quantization using the to spin associated absolutely he did mister just the I don't know nobody's actually you absolutely that's right and so he said why is this any use of quantities well I don't know you have to have a Hamiltonian this company's slightly but then the other thing yes the other thing about this equation he said where does that came he said to me where does that equation come from I said well it comes from the Bianchi identities and he said what are the Bianchi identities and I thought what we don't know what the bang you see and here he'd been doing all this quantization which he obviously knew them he just didn't know they were caught the big ya desert is he knew the contract the contracted ones because of all and it was curious that I mean I guess he he somebody who worked very much in his own too so he knew all these equations but he had no idea those were called the Bianchi identities that's a slight extra story but the point was this came later but the realization that you had this propagation equation which made the gravitational equations look just like maximal equations but first it's been - well it's been well I mean this was done already about power lien fierce or something but they didn't do it this way that is in a much more complicated looking way if you runs into spinners it becomes completely obvious but then I started worrying about the conformal invariants to these equations and it was just struck by this curious fact that that equation is conformally invariant with a particular weighting conformal waiting for the spinner and we already have the interpretation of the file curvature as being the conformal curvature and therefore it has another conformal interpretation so it's a conformal object but the weighting is differently you have two different conformal waiting's and it just strike me strike me there's something important here and I had no idea what it was well so there's only much much later when I realize it is absolutely crucial in a certain way which comes to this leaper heads yes yes well you are asking me about about the second law and what I thought was important and this big problem you see for a long long time I just thought like everybody else that the Big Bang to understand it we need quantum gravity I mean that's that's this conventional view we need quantum gravity maybe it's string theory quantum gravity maybe it's loop quantum gravity maybe it's this kind of grander gravity or the other kind of bond of gravity or twisted quantum gravity but it's called a gravity no that means to me or meant to me quantum gravity must be a jolly funny theory because the singularity you see one of the reasons you're studying quantum gravity is to explain the Big Bang singularity well you see all see how the singularities black holes they're utterly completely different people used to say well you know you've got singularities in the black holes listen to tell you got singularities in the big bank or sink that is the Big Bang therefore in the black holes just the same thing times getting the other way around but it's not there utterly different but it's this entropy thing the singularities in black holes are absolutely wild the curvature of vile curvature goes completely dominates whiles oscillates all over the place complete complete madness in the big bang karma so you could imagine think of the Big Bang is a great violent thing but it's but it's utterly regular gravitation degrees of freedom simply not activated now what kind of quantum gravity is going to give you these two utterly different extremes in the black hole complete domination by the vile curvature in the Big Bang vile curvature seems to be zero or at least very very suppressed okay my review then was to say oh what quantum gravity must be a jolly funny theory with the time not time asymmetric and if we're going to find quantum gravity here you've got to put in time asymmetry somewhere you see so that was my view until well I guess long ago no it was later nine years ago I just had this idea I was thinking about well it took me a long time to be persuaded when I say a long time maybe about three years to be persuaded that the observations of these distant supernovae made by Perlmutter Perlmutter and Schmidt and Reese had convincingly showed that the universe is accelerating in its expansion and they it was all sort of touted as being this totally mysterious thing that nobody could understand totally unexpected and I should say but Gunn look at the ho oh god she looks cosmological constant it's in all the cosmology books I don't know why they thought it was mistake why it should I think we should explain we're talking about dark dark energy dark no it's a very bad name name but nevertheless what's what people call it and it's it's there apparently fits in absolutely perfectly as far as we know now with what the term Einstein introduced in 1917 for admittedly the wrong reason and he wanted to static universe well half of us right in this the only yeah the only modification you can make that's generally kind of absolutely yes a term it's not just a term it is the one thing you can do to generality without wrecking it basically yes without changing it in a radical way that's right and so often I would take into consideration in asymptotics the work I did in trying to live it radiates I'm squashing infinity down and making infinity look like a finite boundary and you can use the conformal in there and some excellent equations or offi of this equation that you get through the propagation of gravitons feel like it tells you what how to study radiation field by looking at infinity and I also knew that if there was a cosmological constant which was positive this surface would be spaced like it would be now if it's not zero cosmological constant time right if it's negative cosmological constant fortunately it's not negative because that causes all sorts of problems even though the string theorists seem to like it positive cosmological constant is a completely different class of problems I used to think it had bad features on reflection it seemed to me they were just unusual features but now it was absolutely crucial because I was thinking about the very remote future and how boring it was going to be in the very remote for sure all the black holes eventually disappear by Hawking evaporation and there's nothing left of any interest and this goes on to Eternity but to me eternity is not such a long time because I'm used to thinking of compressing it down by these conformal scalings this is what defeating time in yes well your argument is basically I mean I tend to use this in lectures and sort of joke but it's a real argument you know the universe gets so incredibly boring but there won't be anybody of us any of us around it'd be bored by us mainly its photons and you can't there are more photons very easily and so photons just go straight into this boundary and the picture I was having I'm getting very used to is the idea of a boundary which you if you've just got massive things that boundary is like anywhere else and then the cathodic 'red to me well you've got a space like boundary for the Big Bang Maya don't you put them together so it's an outrageous thought and I gave lectures on this usually being careful to call it in that rageous idea before anybody else said it was outrageous but as the years went by I began to think more but I think originally I would have given it a reasonable chance have been right reasonable chance maybe not 50% there's more substances in that report odds were candies well you see Paul's hard yes see Paul Todd I had the thing I called the viral curvature hypothesis which was to say that the viol curvature has just a hypothesis a way of characterizing the the Big Bang that as you have an initial type singularity like the Big Bang the viol curvature should be zero but that's awkward to say because it's a singular state what do you mean by a tenth so when it's singular and so on so Paul had a much neater way of expressing it which was to say you've stretched it out it's stretched out the Big Bang back and form factor which is something we did all the time for you know the freedom of models that was quite a standard thing but to make that V conditioned on the Big Bang I think is an important step as Paul has originally it only makes the vowel curvature finite doesn't necessarily zero but as I already knew the infinity the Warka G must be zero because of the way these things scales I said before that because there's a conformal factor in the scale he must scale a biochemist zero so if you stick them together the zero of our curvature must propagate through to be zero on the next Aeon so I started playing around with these ideas half thinking it was completely crazy I suppose and now thinking is probably right and we end up with looking for circles in the sky actually something we can actually see something to do with the Mobius transformations on the sphere well that is it what could be more beautiful it's well you see I was beginning I just didn't care immediately I was trying people to ask me about you know how could you tell if this is right and I thought I'm sort of brother wrongly about gravitational radiation or something but it was later that I occurred to me what's the most violent thing that could happen that we might be a signal getting through and so I was thinking of these collisions between supermassive black holes you see we're on a collision course with Andromeda the Andromeda nebula and it has a black hole which is so forget 20 50 times bigger than ours and we have a four million solar mass black hole it's got a bigger one and they could on our collision course they might well capture each other spiral around boom when they swallow each other up them with one huge explosion in the form almost entirely of gravitational waves and these gravitational waves as I'm used to you got the boundary they will come and they'll hit the boundary in a definite place what will they do when they get through well because of the scalings they can't exist as gravitational waves on the other side they have to scale down into another form and the equations tell us that you have to have a new dark again the word dark isn't very good one but I think on the conformal cyclic cosmology scheme which is what I'm talking about here the acronym or what you call it CCC is this scheme tells us that the gravitation the information in the gravitational waves propagates across but in the form of disturbances in this initial dark matter so you have dark material created and it will be given the kick by this rotational wave impulse they actually have another prediction apart from the circular features corresponding to the outgoing radiation yes that is true I haven't shot it about that well circularly because yeah I mean it's it's what I call the initial form of dark matter because it's massless originally it has to be massless but the equations also tell you that you have to grow mass so that you can't keep massless there's just an inconsistency so the mass has to incur it must be tied in with Higgs mechanisms and so on it hasn't been as yet properly but I think one has to understand more about particle physics how does the Higgs mechanism new the creation of mass in the early universe relates to the appearance of mass which comes in from the equations that you have here this is another huge area of your thought really is how conformal symmetry is broken yes different ways in which is broken which we see much more clearly by expressing things in twisted geometric terms so you can see the breaking explicitly but there are always different aspects to I've always been in two minds about that yes I saw as the cosmological constant has changed a bit because I used to think one of my minds was that you have the if there's no cosmological constants you have these punker a group twisters and that's you have a sort of exact sequence and the exact sequence is play a big role and a lot of homology and twister theory and so on but if you have a cosmological constant you don't quite have an exact sequence you have something which is invertible and it changes one's attitude so i think that was a shift because much of a constant took me a little while to get used to but with the cosmology it comes absolutely crucial you can't you can't do this cosmology without a cosmological constant so you must have dark energy as its called you must have Dark Matter as it's called because there has to be a new created scalar material every time you go from one Eon to the next and so therefore in all of it is not to pile up it's got to decay away - so it must throughout the history of eg on the Dark Matter decays away which I believe there is some rather feeble evidence for I don't know how much to trust it I see must decay rather than clump together which yes a bit but they must eventually decay it must decay yeah otherwise what buildup yes and then you know just build up for me on to am and then you won't have to have a way of propagating so I think it's got a decay but there are some it's not the evidence is not very strong but I heard two bits of evidence one was from a lecture given by Steven Weinberg when he seemed to suggest that the density the the proportion of dark matter was larger in the very early universe than it is now the other thing I picked up on now none of these things neither of these things may be right but I just picked up long because they sort of fit in with what I was thinking the other one was there are observations of pair annihilation I think in in the region near the center well of positrons I think that's with this but you see positrons or something in the region near the center of the decay products I think there is a view may not there may be lots of views that it may be a decay product of dark matter they would go through they go through it yeah not photons it's um yeah I don't have strong views on that but it but it would it would have to go eventually yeah so dark matter yes but then the other thing there's a more recent thing too it's it may explain a lot of things you see of course to lots of that's all the better because there are many things that could contradict is and if there are things that contradict it as Maundy used to say with a steady state model you see the steady state model is that it could be contradicted and of course it was so one has to look out for these things but there is this information which was released in March of this year 2014 about these were called bicep2 observations where the claim is what was has been that this is the smoking gun of inflation I haven't said anything about inflation but I should say that in this model of mine CCC inflation can't be there it would spoil things inflation is supposed to have been this exponential expansion which is supposed to have taken place in the very very early stages of the universe initially the reasons put forward were ones that I always thought were just incorrect having to do with the uniformity of the universe and that only works if you've got a uniformity there all right all right originally it doesn't you can see from general arguments that can't be an argument there are good reasons though kept inflation going one of them being the scale invariance of the fluctuations and temperatures that you see in the microwave background and if you don't have inflation you did another explanation so to me in a sense there was inflation that was the exponential expansion of the eon prior to us which is similar to an idea that bennett siano put forward some years before this scheme of mine so it's not a bad idea but they're not much stronger constraints and what the inflationary I mean for people who inflation is and what they can buy ibly well it there be modes that they claim to see these are polarization photon polarizations that are seen and probably due are correctly seen in in the early universe but the conclusion that is made is that you see these things which couldn't arise from purely magnetic four features they have to be sort of purely electric they have to be magnetic they you get curls which you couldn't have if it was purely electric now Paul Todd was talking to me earlier this year about the problems that there were about the creation of primordial magnetic fields and there are difficulties in ordinary cosmology but where they come from you apparently see them in magnetic fields in these voids regions where there are no galaxies well how on earth did the magnetic fields come about and the view seems to be that they must have been there right from the Big Bang and those would produce be modes so the idea is not just that the B modes that claim are claimed to be The Smoking Gun of inflation and nothing of the sort but of primordial magnetic fields and that those magnetic fields according to the suggestion that Paul made to me is that maybe they came through from the previous Eon which they would on this scheme because they'd be attached to galactic clusters and those little places where the galactic cluster impinges on the crossover surface you'll have magnetic fields and then there was just very recently I was hearing about these things you see and was very rather alarmed by the beamers and the fact that this seemed to be proving inflation so everybody said since that would disprove CCC you see inflation can't coexist with it for various reasons so I'm again thinking well maybe these are the things Paul see claiming should be there and then I emailed my colleague waha Gossage on who had the person initially who seen the evidence of these circular features concentric circular features because these would be each time there's a black hole collision and a galactic cluster there would be boom you see that's one ring little bit later another one boom there's another ring and these would always be concentric because the central point is where that galactic cluster ends up has so he was looking for looking at at least 3 rings where the variance the variation of temperature around the ring is lower by a certain amount than the average and this was the test we were using to for these things and he claims to see lots of indications of these very nominal isotropic of the sky certain regions were huge numbers of them other regions were practically nothing so when I heard about the beamers I said well I emailed diocese where is this region they're seeing these things can you pinpoint it on the sky so he put a little ring so it's in here and this was in in his Planck map so this was the recent more recent the old ones with the W map when he looked at the Planck map ones and I looked at his picture nothing whatsoever in there so oh dear so I look back at the old W map one's same place and bang there was a triple of rings right in the middle so then I emailed by hey and I said well why don't I see them in the Planck data C said oh well I'll turn up the volume a bit didn't say quite like that looking at slightly lower signals and they're there they are absolutely right in the middle more over moreover if these are Paul Todd's well if the BMO's really are magnetic fields and after these rings are really from that galactic cluster in the previous Eon it's only just on the edge just from the geometry it has to be where our past light cone it's where the galactic cluster ends up and therefore the temperature of these rings must be average even the distant ones that signals coming towards us and therefore warmer the close ones signals going away for us and therefore cooler the ones which are just on the edge would be of average temperature I look at these rings they're right the color coding is green which means right in the middle so this is sort of exciting yes if this is right when we could make prediction well we make the predictions anyway but we'll see whether because the Planck data hasn't come up out yet on this and so it looks as though we might make a prediction of the sorts of places to look for where you should see B modes because those in if that's right see this is the second observational feature of the scheme but nobody pays any attention to the first one yet it's been almost completely ignored I mean there were exciting verifications of this we had lost not September yes yeah well with them Christophe Meisner gave a very nice talk where he explained his analysis which is quite different from from Vaheguru John's analysis and he also saw significant evidence for these rings yes looked at in a different way but yes it's the same the same feature but again or no no attention paid on some different subject predictions how do you think things stand on the evidence for quantum mechanical dependence of biological structure yeah the brain there had been some interesting things in in recent years yes well you see first I should explain that you see I wrote my book the emperor's new mind hoping that by the time I got to the end of the book I would have some inkling if quantum effects could be relevant to action to brain and I couldn't it was wasn't it kind of petered out there but it did have the advantage I mean I thought maybe I would inspire young people to do physics or something it was more either ancient retired people who wrote to me or else it was somebody in other scientific subjects and one of these was Stuart Hameroff who did read my book and he said well look you may not know about these things called microtubules that's just showing my ignorance I never heard of them at that time these are the things that in mitosis when the cell divides you see the chromosomes being pulled apart and these microtubules are dragging them apart they play all sorts of roles in cells generally but they seem to have a particular role according to Stuart anyway Stuart Hameroff that they play a particular role in consciousness in the brain and his business professional activity is putting people to sleep as an anesthesiologist in Arizona and so unlike maybe many of his colleagues who were just interested in putting people to sleep he's sort of interested in actually what he's doing when he's putting people to sleep so and his idea has been and he tells me that there is now some good evidence that this is the case that general anesthetics do act on directly on microtubules so these are little nano scale tubes which are in MIT and all sorts of almost all cells in the body and in neurons but the argument is that they have a different role in neurons and that they play a central role in consciousness something very interesting has come up on with several things one is some observation about where you could track where the consciousness kind of peers what part of the brain is involved and one thing that always worried me for a long time about most explanations of consciousness in terms of computation or something is why is the cerebellum not conscious it seems to be entirely unconscious yet they're about half as many neurons as in the brain and far more connections between neurons in the cerebellum than in the cerebrum yet the cerebrum seems to be where consciousness comes about well these new observations have to do with these things called pyramidal cells para para ponerse six a para para mental cells which are particularly they're sort of cells which look like pyramids I suppose but they don't occur in the cerebellum at all they occur in certain part of the brain which is now identified as a major part where consciousness that's come about and they are absolutely packed with microtubules apparently so this is an inch one interesting development it's it's alters the picture somewhat but I've always been wired by why the cerebellum with all these connections and so on why isn't that indicate why is that unconscious but it seems to be it doesn't have these particular types of cells and that may be a crucial thing but the other important development has to do with the experimental findings of an urban Bandyopadhyay who has been doing experiments largely in Japan with colleagues he's an Indian doing experiments there and on individual microtubules where they measure the resistance with particular frequencies if either they're very particular frequencies where thing becomes extremely conductive in ways which are quite unlike classical conduction you see I had the complicated roundabout route for thinking that quantum mechanics has to be playing a role and not just quantum mechanics but beyond quantum mechanics see it's not just outrageous but people used to think of our brain is all wet and messy and how can you have coherent quantum mechanics going on there but I'm saying not only that it's got to be at the level extended to the level where you start to see divergence from standard quantum mechanics now that's totally outrageous you see but my reasoning came from the girdle things and saying well really seems that our understanding cannot be something of a purely computational character and it's very interesting because of course with tearing it seemed in his early years he was very I think you would be very alive to these questions more than people who thought because he wrote this paper on ordinal logics and which was trying to you know going beyond systems yeah I mean difficult to tell I mean I think the success of computational methods during the war really got him going and I think how much you could go yes in that direction but he was certainly worried about the physics is actually quantum mechanical yeah yeah that's in a way that other people not exposed to it but then you see normally one would think you could you could compute at least to any degree of accuracy as a sort of argument Turing himself would make that what have what the Schrodinger equation does but then your standard quantum mechanics you then have to use the Schrodinger equation only is probabilistic but then you have to have a measurement well he was very aware of the reduction yes that's right they'd be rule 2 yeah cuz I mean you got that directly for von Neumann which is probably also how are you so but what's interesting is that now in biology it's not just in these microtubules because that's been the Apache has some observations which do seem to indicate something very strange is going on in microtubules which certainly is not classical and how you explain it quantum mechanically well that's people don't even know how to explain high-temperature superconductivity properly yet so there's there are lots of things to understand there but now we know photosynthesis involves entanglements want essentially quantum mechanical effects some things about nothing but bird navigation is it I think it is something and sensitivity to magnetic fields or some of these these things do seem to tell us that there's a lot more going on in biology in which you simply can't explain purely classically part from part from chemistry which is already quantum mechanical but you see I'm saying you've got to have enough quantum mechanics that it's coherent across many neurons in a way which allows sufficient displacement of mass according to the scheme that I trying to develop with what do she originally had a scheme like this and then for different with different motivations I picked up on an idea very similar which is that when insuperable additions if there's a must enough mass displacement and then it goes over into a classical alternatives but this is very round upon - quantum mechanics people because they think the quantum mechanics has to hold in durably at all levels but all experiments to date have only been at a level where you don't probe this is root area so there's experiments hiding in the wings there - well thank you very much Roger for getting this time well time again time is dominating yeah well it's been a great pleasure for me it's always a pleasure to talk about these things and try to rake up and maybe inspire someone who's watching this to think it would be nice who knows

Channel: The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Views: 47,618

Rating: 4.835443 out of 5

Keywords: Roger Penrose, University of Oxford, Dirac, Sciama, stephen hawking, richard feynman, Quantum Theory, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Cosmology, Consciousness, quantum mechanics

Id: tzGT8VruvC4

Length: 93min 0sec (5580 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2018