Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and of University College London (UCL).
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a popular-science book on cosmology by English physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers without prior knowledge of physics and people who are just interested in learning something new.
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time is a 1973 treatise on the theoretical physics of spacetime by the physicist Stephen Hawking and the mathematician George Ellis. It is intended for specialists in general relativity rather than newcomers.
In philosophy, philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in modern physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Philosophy of physics can be broadly lumped into three areas:
The Universe in a Nutshell is a 2001 book about theoretical physics by Stephen Hawking. It is generally considered a sequel and was created to update the public concerning developments since the multi-million-copy bestseller A Brief History of Time published in 1988.
The Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems are a set of results in general relativity that attempt to answer the question of when gravitation produces singularities. Penrose would go on to win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity," which he shared with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.
In theoretical physics, a Penrose diagram is a two-dimensional diagram capturing the causal relations between different points in spacetime through a conformal treatment of infinity. It is an extension of a Minkowski diagram where the vertical dimension represents time, and the horizontal dimension represents a space dimension, and slanted lines at an angle of 45° correspond to light rays . The biggest difference is that locally, the metric on a Penrose diagram is conformally equivalent to the actual metric in spacetime. The conformal factor is chosen such that the entire infinite spacetime is transformed into a Penrose diagram of finite size, with infinity on the boundary of the diagram. For spherically symmetric spacetimes, every point in the Penrose diagram corresponds to a 2-dimensional sphere .
The black hole information paradox is a puzzle resulting from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Calculations suggest that physical information could permanently disappear in a black hole, allowing many physical states to devolve into the same state. This is controversial because it violates a core precept of modern physics—that, in principle, the value of a wave function of a physical system at one point in time should determine its value at any other time. A fundamental postulate of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is that complete information about a system is encoded in its wave function up to when the wave function collapses. The evolution of the wave function is determined by a unitary operator, and unitarity implies that information is conserved in the quantum sense.
Werner Israel, is a physicist, author, researcher, and professor at the University of Victoria.
Dennis William Siahou Sciama, was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD supervisor to many famous cosmologists, including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees and David Deutsch; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.
Robert M. Wald is an American theoretical physicist who studies gravitation. His research interests include general relativity, black holes, and quantum gravity. He is also a science communicator and textbook author.
In philosophy, the Rietdijk–Putnam argument, named after C. W. Rietdijk and Hilary Putnam, uses 20th-century findings in physics – specifically in special relativity – to support the philosophical position known as four-dimensionalism.
Hawking is a BBC television film about Stephen Hawking's early years as a PhD student at Cambridge University, following his search for the beginning of time, and his struggle against motor neuron disease. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Hawking and premiered in the UK in April 2004.
Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge at the time of his death. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.
The Grand Design is a popular-science book written by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and published by Bantam Books in 2010. The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe and explains eleven-dimensional M-theory. The authors of the book point out that a Unified Field Theory may not exist.
Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe is a science book by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose published by The Bodley Head in 2010. The book outlines Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model, which is an extension of general relativity but opposed to the widely supported multidimensional string theories and cosmological inflation following the Big Bang.
The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind is a popular science book by British theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997.
Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe is a book by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, released in September 2016. The book is based on his lectures that he gave at Princeton University in 2003.
The Princeton Science Library is a book series of popular science written by scientists known for their popular writings and originally published by Princeton University Press.
