Sir Roger Penrose

Tonight we saw Sir Roger Penrose speak at Town Hall as yet another installment in the Seattle Science Lecture Series. Penrose was in town to promote his new book titled The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

I'd normally give you a well wrapped up synopsis here, but the notes I took are worthless. Penrose came across as the quintessential absent-minded professor jumping from one train of thought to the next and never staying on any one topic long enough for me to actually jot down anything meaningful. This is not to say he was boring, it was actually quite the contrary. He had a great sense of humor and it was mesmerizing to watch him bounce around from topic to topic. At one point he just started showing us random diagrams he drew for the book. One example he showed used special mathematical notations that he had developed to represent concepts from physics, but we got no explanation of what any of the symbols meant or how they were relevant. In another one he put up a weird looking diagram and said this is a "3-D drawing of something". I'm telling you, it was awesome!