Penrose is a British mathematician and physicist who worked with Stephen Hawking on many matters relating to the general theory of relativity, black holes, and other areas of theoretical physics. In 1965 he showed that a collapsing star would collapse into infinite density in zero space—into something called a singularity. Working together, the two produced a paper in 1970 that stated there must have been a big bang singularity. With John Wheeler, he showed that all black holes must be spherical. He discussed with Hawking his idea that the black hole’s event horizon was also its area.
Get the entire A Brief History of Time LitChart as a printable PDF.
Roger Penrose Character Timeline in A Brief History of Time
The timeline below shows where the character Roger Penrose appears in A Brief History of Time. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...start for Stephen Hawking's own work in theoretical physics, and later he showed with Roger Penrose that Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested there was indeed a beginning and end to...
(full context)
Chapter 3
In 1965, Roger Penrose showed that stars can collapse in on themselves to become singularities, in this case, black...
(full context)
Over the millennia, our understanding has changed significantly. Penrose and Hawking’s work showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is only a partial theory....
(full context)
Chapter 6
Penrose and Hawking showed in the late 1960s that there must be a singularity of infinite...
(full context)
...star could become a black hole, meaning there were no black holes in reality. But Penrose and Wheeler said a non-rotating star’s gravitational waves during its collapse would make it spherical....
(full context)
Chapter 7
This non-decreasing nature of black holes determines much of their behavior. Penrose agreed with Hawking, and they determined a black hole’s area could be determined by its...
(full context)
