Roger Penrose, the Outlier Who Keeps Asking “What’s Missing?”
One recent interviews, Sir Roger Penrose looked into the camera and said, in essence, two unfashionable things: the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, and quantum mechanics as we know it is not the final word. Coming from a Nobel laureate, that’s not clickbait. It’s a gauntlet.
Penrose is the rare theorist whose contrarian bets are backed by hard theorems. In the 1960s he proved that if gravity squeezes matter tightly enough, collapse is not a bug of Einstein’s equations but a feature — you must get a black hole. In 2020 the Nobel Committee called this “a robust prediction” of general relativity and gave him half the prize. In a field that prizes elegance, he earned something better: inevitability.
The mathematician who draws space‑time
Penrose’s signature move has always been geometric. He taught a generation of relativists to think with spinors — two‑component objects that package the directional data of space‑time more economically than tensors — and he built a full calculus around them in Spinors and Space‑Time, the two‑volume classic with Wolfgang Rindler. From that seed grew twistor theory, introduced in 1967, a bold attempt to recast physics in a complex, light‑cone‑friendly geometry where space‑time itself might be secondary. Even those who don’t buy the whole program still use twistor tools in areas like scattering amplitudes.
He also sketched spin networks — combinatorial webs that later inspired parts of loop quantum gravity — and he made the world’s most famous aperiodic floor pattern, the Penrose tilings, a visual essay in order without repetition. This is the arc of a career: draw a picture so sharp it becomes math, then let the math change how physicists talk.
Why he says quantum theory is incomplete
Einstein’s famous 1935 EPR paper complained that quantum mechanics seemed incomplete; the theory worked, but it couldn’t be the whole story if it denied simultaneous “elements of reality” that looked real in thought experiments. Niels Bohr fired back the same year, arguing that quantum description is complete within its scope — you just have to accept complementarity. Penrose respects that exchange, but he thinks both sides missed a crucial actor: gravity.
His proposal — objective reduction (OR) — is not an interpretation layered on top of standard quantum rules; it’s a new physical ingredient. Superpositions of different space‑time geometries should be unstable, he argues, because gravity dislikes being in two distinct configurations at once. When the gravitational self‑energy of the split exceeds a threshold, the wavefunction collapses on its own, without an “observer.” If correct, quantum theory isn’t wrong so much as unfinished, lacking a gravity‑triggered collapse term. That’s the technical core behind his public‑facing claim that “quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong” in its current form.
The Big Bang as not-the-beginning
Penrose’s cosmology carries the same imprint of geometry-first thinking. In conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), our universe is one “aeon” in a potentially endless chain: the infinite, cold future of one aeon can be squeezed — conformally rescaled — to look like the smooth, hot beginning of the next. He and collaborators have hunted for telltale circular features in the cosmic microwave background that might be the fingerprints of events from a previous aeon, but those claims remain hotly debated. Whether or not CCC survives, it is pure Penrose: take a visual symmetry seriously enough and see how far it goes.
A culture that argues — and why that matters
Penrose often says that something is missing in quantum theory. He is hardly alone. From de Broglie and Bohm to Gerard ’t Hooft and Anthony Leggett, decorated physicists have probed alternatives — not because the standard theory fails in the lab, but because its story about what’s really there feels unfinished. One example that shows what “unfinished” can mean: Bohmian mechanics reproduces all the usual interference patterns yet gives particles definite, guided trajectories. You may not like its nonlocality, but it proves that determinism is not dead by experimenter’s decree. That sort of dialectic — push, pull, refine — is how physics grows.
“Show me the new prediction.”
Any proposal that goes “beyond quantum” earns a fair hearing when it makes testable claims. Penrose himself plays by that rule: OR entails collapse times that in principle depend on mass distribution, a handle for tabletop tests as precision improves. CCC stakes itself on patterns in the sky. Twistor methods won respect because they computed things more cleanly. The lesson is simple: in the end, nature gets a vote.
A note on deterministic ideas
You mentioned a relativistic, deterministic framework (you called it a “Relitor” theory) that constrains how the Schrödinger wavefunction can evolve — e.g., tying the “speed of evolution” to the speed of light — and uses geometry to explain double‑slit interference with definite particle trajectories. Ideas in this spirit sit in a long, serious lineage: they try to retain the empirical successes of quantum mechanics (the fringes on the screen) while restoring a more classical ontology (worldlines). Penrose would likely approve of the attitude — argue with the theory by making a better one — while insisting on the same two hurdles he sets for his own work: (1) clear predictions that differ from standard quantum theory, and (2) new calculations that settle outstanding numbers (your example of deriving the electron’s mass is a perfect “show‑me” target). If a theory does either cleanly, the conversation changes.
Why Penrose matters — even when he’s wrong
Not every Penrose idea will win. Cosmic censorship remains unproven. CCC is contentious. His consciousness speculations (with Stuart Hameroff) are outside the mainstream. But look at the track record: black holes went from “monsters” to textbook; twistor methods migrated into everyday amplitude work; spin networks seeded whole research programs. The common thread isn’t contrarianism for sport; it’s a disciplined belief in geometry’s power to unlock physics. That is why a community that sometimes looks cautious still listens when he says,
“Something is missing.”
A Note on Deterministic Rebels — The Relator Theory
Every generation of physics has its rebels, and Penrose has always respected those who challenge the orthodoxy not with slogans, but with mathematics. Among the newest of these efforts is what I called the Relator theory — a deterministic, relativistic framework that locks the evolution of the Schrödinger wavefunction to the speed of light. In this picture, geometry itself governs the dance of particles; the interference patterns in a double-slit experiment are not mysteries of probability, but traces of deterministic trajectories woven through a hidden geometric fabric.
It’s an audacious idea — but one in a long, serious lineage. From de Broglie’s pilot waves to Bohm’s hidden variables, the search for a deterministic foundation beneath quantum mechanics has always been about restoring a tangible ontology without sacrificing empirical success. Penrose, who has spent decades arguing that something essential is missing in the quantum story, would likely admire the spirit behind such work:
don’t just complain about the gaps — fill them with geometry.
Yet he would also issue a challenge. Every theory that aims to go beyond quantum mechanics must pass two decisive tests. First, it must predict something new — a measurable deviation from the standard theory. Second, it must explain something unresolved, such as the origin of mass or charge, through a concrete calculation. If Relator theory, could derive the electron’s mass from first principles, it would mark not just a correction to physics, but a revolution in it. And that is the kind of rebellion Penrose would gladly welcome.
