Sir Roger Penrose: "The Name "Big Bang" Was a Joke."
Sir Roger Penrose on his path to understanding reality. An interview with the physicist who described the universe like no one before him.
By Marta Emilia Bielińska
Marta Bielińska: Some people have favorite numbers, but a Nobel Prize-winning physicist probably needs to be asked something more abstract. Do you have a favorite symmetry group, for example?
Sir Roger Penrose: I hadn't thought of it that way before, but there is a symmetry group I'd like to mention — known as SL(2,C). I don't want to go into technical details, but I find it beautiful in a mathematical sense. There is something even more important, though — its connection to physics, because it appears in the theory of relativity and concerns spacetime. That is what is decisive for me. For mathematicians, there are probably far more interesting structures.
