The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics

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Penguin Books, 1991 - Computers - 466 pages
Will a computer eventually be able to do everything a human can do? For decades, proponents of artificial intelligence have argued yes. In The Emperor's New Mind, eminent physicist Roger Penrose argues that there are facets of human thinking, of human imagination, that can never be emulated by a machine. Exploring a dazzling array of topics -- complex numbers, black holes, entropy, quasicrystals, the structure of the brain, and the physical processes of consciousness -- Penrose demonstrates that laws even more wondrously complex than those of quantum mechanics are essential for the operation of a mind.

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Contents

Prologue
1
Algorithms and Turing machines
30
Mathematics and reality
74
Copyright

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About the author (1991)

Born in England, the son of a geneticist, Roger Penrose received a Ph.D. in 1957 from Cambridge University. Penrose then became a professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in 1966 and a Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University in 1973. Penrose, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, has done much to elucidate the fundamental properties of black holes. With Stephen Hawking, Penrose proved a theorem of Albert Einstein's general relativity, asserting that at the center of a black hole there must evolve a "space-time singularity" of zero volume and infinite density, in which the current laws of physics do not apply. He also proposed the hypothesis of "cosmic censorship," which claims that such singularities must possess an event horizon. In 1969 Penrose described a process for the extraction of energy from a black hole, as well as how rotational energy of the black hole is transferred to a particle outside the hole. In addition, Penrose has done much to develop the mathematics needed to unite general relativity, which deals with the gravitational interactions of matter, and quantum mechanics, which describes all other interactions.

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