Saturday, April 5, 2014

New Penrose interview

Roger Penrose is writing a book on "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy", and gives this interview:
Sir Roger Penrose calls string theory a "fashion," quantum mechanics "faith," and cosmic inflation a "fantasy." Coming from an armchair theorist, these declarations might be dismissed. But Penrose is a well-respected physicist who co-authored a seminal paper on black holes with Stephen Hawking. What's wrong with modern physics—and could alternative theories explain our observations of the universe?
He has his own speculative theories, such as the BICEP2 data not being evidence of inflation or gravity waves, but of magnetic fields in a previous universe before the big bang.

A lot of people are skeptical about string theory and inflation models. He thinks that quantum mechanics is incomplete because we do not understand wave function collapse.

He is one of the leading mathematical physicists alive today, and his ideas should be taken seriously.

2 comments:

  1. Roger,
    ask yourself this question about those back ground microwaves. How do they know the source? How can they tell how old the background radiation is vs. newer microwave radiation? If you check out some of the microwave background images of last year round March of 2013, in several of the pictures were indications of something almost plane like about a higher concentration of CMB. I would be curious if that plane like spike had anything to do with the plane of the solar system or the galaxy we are a part of. I find it remarkable that no one wanted to renormalize the image and explain what exactly was in the direction of the higher concentrations of signal. Why couldn't the CMB background been caused by other things like galaxies or even our own solar system? If our own star system has it's own EM field, would this not show CMB all around us? Do not suns generate microwaves?

    https://www.google.com/search?q=cmb+images&biw=1241&bih=960&tbm=isch&imgil=BYPE8i-zjVBikM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcS3s_SBRc3qE5FguzBrFTb7q0pKAnvD2HgXDdQOBJrtiDjZXYdJeQ%253B3410%253B1705%253BoMz9NStwitb9XM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fblogs.discovermagazine.com%25252Foutthere%25252Ftag%25252Fcmb%25252F&source=iu&usg=__DdMJ8nx3el8pchsWd4kXAPyD_m4%3D&sa=X&ei=tcZCU4i8C-OzsASex4GQDQ&ved=0CDIQ9QEwBQ#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=BYPE8i-zjVBikM%253A%3BoMz9NStwitb9XM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblogs.discovermagazine.com%252Foutthere%252Ffiles%252F2013%252F03%252FPlanck_anomalies_Bianchi_on_CMB_orig.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblogs.discovermagazine.com%252Foutthere%252Ftag%252Fcmb%252F%3B3410%3B1705

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  2. nice to see Penrose follow through on earlier promises to treat of such topics

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