Tag: Roger Penrose
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Programmatic adventures in the hyperbolic plane
Recursion is dangerous. So dangerous that in my professional life I’m explicitly banned from using it in code. After all who would want their aeroplane to stall, their car to crash or their fridge to defrost because of a stack overflow. But it is also, most (but not all) programmers would agree, beautiful and more…
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And the projective representation of the hyperbolic plane
For completeness, here is the projective representation of the hyperbolic plane.
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Representing equal distances in the conformal representation of the hyperbolic plane
(This is mainly about posting a pretty picture.) As I have previously remarked, the last couple of times I have tried to read Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality I have stumbled over the discussion of non-Euclidean geometry in Chapter 2 (of a 34 chapter book). Now I feel more confident about the maths but…
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In praise of Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose has been awarded a share in the Nobel Prize for physics and I could not be more pleased. It is not that I have met him or even attended a lecture by him and nor do we even see him much on TV – but I owe him a debt for his insight…
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Representing one terabit of information
I picked up my copy of Roger Penrose‘s Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universeand reread his opening chapter on the nature of entropy (if you struggle with this concept as a student then I recommend the book for this part alone – his exposition is brilliant). My next thought was to…
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Entropy and randomness in communications, a quick introduction
Last year I remarked on how Roger Penrose‘s discussion of entropy in Cycles of Time did more to explain the physical nature of the concept (to me, at least) than many years of formal education. And now, another book, Information and Coding Theory has given me some real insight into how computers deliver pseudo-randomness and…
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Review of “The Black Cloud”
My interest in astronomy and astrophysics comes from childhood and when I was much, much younger I had an (unscientific) fondness for the “steady state” theory of cosmology, which, in the early 1970s was not as thoroughly discredited as it is today (though, of course, many newer cosmologies borrow from it or show similarities to…
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It’s official: we’re getting bigger all the time says Nobel Committee
The decision to award this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics to three astrophysicists who, through measuring the brightness of distant supernovae showed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, is simply the highest possible confirmation of what most if not all in the field have accepted for a decade or more. That idea is…
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Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics
When I wrote my first piece about Roger Penrose‘s Cycles of Time – one of the links offered to me was to a Christian fundamentalist blogger who claimed that the second law of thermodynamics showed evolution could not have taken place: E. Evolution contradicts the Second law of Thermodynamics In the Theory of Evolution it…
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The second law of thermodynamics and the history of the universe
I had to go on quite a long plane journey yesterday and I bought a book to read – Roger Penrose‘s work on cosmology: Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe I bought it on spec – it was on the popular science shelves: somewhere I usually avoid at least for the…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 