In an interview on The Atom

Lastly, The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose.

Penrose is rather less well-known than his young sidekick Stephen Hawking, but between them they developed the theory of black holes. Einstein had provided the mathematical framework with his general theory of relativity but they studied them theoretically to understand their properties.

What?

Well, spotting and identifying a black hole is astronomy. This has nothing to do with that – it is theoretical work. Anyway, in this book Penrose brings together different areas of modern science like quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, which says that if things are left to their own devices they decay and unwind and disorder increases.

How do you mean?

If you take an ordered pack of cards and shuffle it they will get mixed up. That doesn’t work the other way round. If you take a disordered pack of cards and shuffle it they won’t come back up in the right order. Well, they might but the odds are so tiny that we can ignore them. Things do not spontaneously order themselves. So, the question is, unless you have a divine creator, how are we, such organised and developed structures, here?

His ultimate idea is that he wants to explain consciousness using logic, philosophy, quantum mechanics. This is very controversial and has spawned all kinds of inter-disciplinary conferences with theologians, philosophers, physicists, all exploring the ideas that come from this book. He does come up with a way to get complexity out of randomness without God. There are proteins in the brain, tubulin, which can have two shapes at the same time, a quantum superposition, but when consciousness clicks in they choose one particular shape. But this idea of how we get complex structures from random chance and simple rules is fascinating. In fact, I am presenting a documentary called The Secret Life of Chaos on BBC4 this week, which explains how complexity and the universe could have emerged from randomness.

Do you believe in God.

I don’t.