Roger Penrose: Collected Works: Volume 4

Professor Sir Roger Penrose's work, spanning fifty years of science, with over five thousand pages and more than three hundred papers, has been collected together for the first time and arranged chronologically over six volumes, each with an introduction from the author. Where relevant, individual papers also come with specific introductions or notes.

Among the new developments that occurred during this period was the introduction of a particular notion of 'quasi-local mass-momentum and angular momentum', the topic of Penrose's Royal Society paper. Many encouraging results were initially obtained but, later, difficulties began to emerge and remain today. Also, an extensive paper (with Eastwood and Wells) gives a thorough account of the relation between twistor cohomology and massless fields. This volume witnesses Penrose's increasing conviction that the puzzling issue of quantum measurement could only be resolved by the appropriate unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity, where that union must involve an actual change in the rules of quantum mechanics as well as in space-time structure. Penrose's first incursions into a possible relation between consciousness and quantum state reduction are also covered here.

Sir Roger Penrose is renowned for his significant contributions to mathematical physics, in particular general relativity and cosmology. Currently Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1957, before being appointed Research Fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge. He then spent time at Princeton and Syracuse University before returning to the UK as a research associate at King's College, London, which was quickly followed by a further stint in the U.S. at the University of Texas at Austin. He then returned to the UK to Birkbeck College, London, where he eventually became Professor of Applied Mathematics. In 1973, he was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, earning the status Emeritus Professor in 1998. In the same year, he was also appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London.

Penrose has been awarded numerous honors for his scientific contributions: in 1975 with Stephen Hawking he was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1988 Penrose and Hawking were awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics for their development of the theory of general relativity. In 1985, Penrose received the Royal Society's Royal Medal and in 1989 he was honored with the Dirac Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics. In 1990, he received the Albert Einstein Medal, followed by the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1991, and the DeMorgan Medal for his wide and original contributions to mathematical physics in 2004. A Fellow of the Royal Society of London since 1972, Penrose was elected Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and in 1994 he was knighted for services to science.