On a September day in 1964, Roger Penrose and a talkative colleague came across a busy London street. The traffic blocked the flow of his companion's speech for a brief moment - a moment in which Penrose had an idea, but he immediately forgot it until the colleague had said goodbye. "Suddenly I had this strange elation," the British gravity theorist said later. At that time he wondered where it was coming from - then he remembered the street and his idea. As it turned out, it was the crucial step in proving that black holes actually exist: If a sufficiently massive star runs out of nuclear fire, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity will force the star to collapse into somethingfrom whose surroundings light no longer even escapes, but ends in a so-called singularity in the center of the former star. For this realization, Roger Penrose received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics 56 years later.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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But he was famous for a long time.
Not quite as famous as his compatriot Stephen Hawking, of course, with whom he was later able to show in the 1960s that, according to Einstein's theory, the entire cosmos necessarily has a singularity - here one at the beginning of all things, in the Big Bang.
Without the connection to the media phenomenon Hawking, Penrose would never have become a film character (embodied by Christian McKay in the Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything" from 2014), but he also became a researcher with a broad impact - albeit without any airs.
Exceptionally broad area of interest
As the son of an eminent geneticist, brother of a statistics professor and a chess master, Roger Penrose never grew up knowing that he was always the smartest person in the room. And he always enjoyed explaining his ideas and research questions to more than just colleagues and making them understandable with hand-drawn graphics. To date, he has published five non-fiction books for a wider audience, one of which is more than a thousand pages thick. They sold well to very well - despite Penrose's refusal to forego mathematics and their symbolic language, and despite the thoroughly demanding content.
These span large parts of the exceptionally broad area of interest of the studied mathematician who, after completing his doctoral thesis, turned to theoretical physics under the influence of Paul Dirac and remained loyal to it, even though he held the Rouse Ball Chair in Mathematics from 1973 until his retirement in 1998 at Oxford University. Sir Roger, as he has been allowed to call himself since the Queen's accolade in 1994, has dealt in his career with logic and questions about the limits of artificial intelligence, with geometry - to which he contributed the so-called Penrose tiling - with cosmology and always again with gravitation and its still completely unexplained relationship to quantum physics.
In questions of cosmology, his scientific and popular scientific work endeavors to stay on the ground of what is empirically accessible, at least in principle. Colleagues who rant about multiverses or who sell their natural philosophical ideas as physical theories find little favor with him. As for the search for a unified theory of quantum gravity, Penrose firmly believes that it should be guided more by Einstein's theory of gravity and less by the laws of quantum. Most of the approaches followed today, first and foremost string theory, do exactly the opposite and have one of their most astute and original critics in Roger Penrose. Today the ingenious mathematician and physician is 90 years old.