The Emperor’s New Mind

"I read The Emperor’s New Mind when I was either finishing or had just finished my PhD. There was huge excitement when it came out in 1989. It was a book that was so rich in lots of different areas. I just remember the excitement of reading it and feeling, ‘Yes! And this is the subject that I’ve chosen to work on for my career!’ He really got across the passion across lots of different areas. Again, it’s a book that I think could be enjoyed by anyone who wants to know a little bit more about the subject. And it really hasn’t dated much. I believe so. He wasn’t simply Stephen Hawking’s sidekick, as many people might see him. He’s now 88—I know that because he’s the same age as my father—and he’s still coming up with ideas, with ways of explaining the evolution of the universe. Between them Hawking and Penrose developed the theory of black holes. Einstein had provided the mathematical framework with his general theory of relativity, but they studied them theoretically to understand their properties. Well, spotting and identifying a black hole is astronomy . This has nothing to do with that – it is theoretical work. Anyway, in this book Penrose brings together different areas of modern science like quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, which says that if things are left to their own devices they decay and unwind and disorder increases. If you take an ordered pack of cards and shuffle it they will get mixed up. That doesn’t work the other way round. If you take a disordered pack of cards and shuffle it they won’t come back up in the right order. Well, they might but the odds are so tiny that we can ignore them. Things do not spontaneously order themselves. So, the question is, unless you have a divine creator, how are we such organised and developed structures, here? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . His ultimate idea is that he wants to explain consciousness using logic, philosophy and quantum mechanics. This is very controversial and has spawned all kinds of interdisciplinary conferences with theologians, philosophers, physicists, all exploring the ideas that come from this book. He does come up with a way to get complexity out of randomness without God. There are proteins in the brain, tubulin, which can have two shapes at the same time, a quantum superposition, but when consciousness clicks in they choose one particular shape. But this idea of how we get complex structures from random chance and simple rules is fascinating. I don’t."