The closer we get to the speed of light, the greater the effect would be. If we could make a journey at extremely high speed, we would find on our return that our contemporaries were much older than us. As Einstein was the first to realise, the faster we move, the slower time passes for us. That sounds like a joke too, but is in fact an acute observation. “A desolate and terribly boring prospect,” Penrose jokes, adding, “But fortunately the waves of light won’t get bored.” (Last week, Penrose’s pioneering work on black holes earned him a share of this year’s Nobel prize for physics.) With the lapse of aeons of time, black holes themselves will end up evaporating and there will be nothing left but a universe of waves of light racing through nothingness for all eternity. What will happen in the distant future? The clusters of galaxies will recede from each other at increasing speeds, stars will be extinguished, everything will be reduced to a few black holes and light waves wandering in an ever more boundless and glacial space. We have recently discovered that the universe is expanding at ever-increasing speed. In this case, the pond is the entire universe, and the stone that fell into the water a collision between colossal black holes that occurred before the big bang …įrom left, Roger Penrose, Ezra T Newman and Carlo Rovelli enjoy lunch at a restaurant in November 2019. Think of the waves that persist in a pond after a stone has been dropped into the water, forming concentric circles of increasing size. These traces could be immense concentric rings in the sky that may be glimpsed in the “cosmic background radiation”, the weak residual radiation of the big bang which fills the universe. His idea is that by looking at the sky, perhaps it is possible to see, or rather to have perhaps already seen, traces of events that occurred before the big bang. But his mind remains lucid, and when he talks about his latest idea, presented for the general reader in his most recent book, From the Big Bang to Eternity, he becomes enthused.
He jokes about how one’s memory goes, and about the house keys that he locked inside when he closed the door that morning, leaving early for Italy. Penrose, despite being in his 80s, has a youthful air, and his eyes are still enchanted by the world. They are also known as “quasi-crystals” and exist in nature, but they have also been used in fields that range from design of floor tiles to a children’s game devised by Penrose himself. In the field of pure mathematics, he is better known for his study of “quasi-periodic” structures, tessellations composed of a few elements that can be repeated to infinity but that, however, are not periodic: they never repeat identically. Readers know him for several books, among them the dense and wonderful The Road to Reality, a great panorama of contemporary physics and mathematics, a popular work that is not easy and that shines with intelligence and profundity on every page.Īmong his main contributions to our knowledge of the universe are theorems showing that Einstein’s theory implies that the universe we see originated from a big bang and black holes form generically.
I had the pleasure of meeting Roger Penrose, the great mathematician from Oxford, when he was passing through Italy for the Festival of Science in Genoa.
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