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Computers and Consciousness
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17123 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1990 |
2,419 Words |
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Charles Sheffield
Charles Sheffield is the author of several science fiction
novels as well as numerous articles and essays on physics and
space science. |
THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND
Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
Roger Penrose
Oxford University Press, 1989
466 pp., $24.95
Reviews should surely be of books, not of authors; but when someone proposes radical changes to our accepted worldviews, we tend to examine his personal credentials as the first step toward establishing credibility. What then are the credentials of Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind?
He has been a creative force in mathematics and theoretical physics for thirty-five years. While still a graduate student at Cambridge, England, in the mid-1950s, he developed Penrose's Theorem, a general theorem on plane conics with double contact, from which hundreds of other well-known results fall out as special cases. In the same period he and his father, the well-known geneticist Lionel Penrose, developed the "impossible" three-dimensional figures that form the basis of several of the artist Maurits Escher's best-known drawings.
In 1960 Penrose introduced the spinors of Elie Cartan into general relativity, where they have become a powerful and accepted analytic method; five years latter, with Ezra Newman, he found a new way to characterize space-time geometry through the Newman-Penrose constants. His best-known work in general relativity comes from the same period: the singularity theorems, which characterize the global geometry of space-time. For this work, Penrose and coworker Stephen Hawking were awarded the Wolf
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