Roger Penrose

Biography

Between 1964 and 1973, Roger Penrose taught mathematics at Birkbeck College in London, where he developed the theory describing the collapse of stars into themselves, and where he met the famous physicist Stephen Hawking. They then worked on a theory of the origin of the universe, with Penrose making a mathematical contribution to the theory of general relativity applied to cosmology and the study of black holes. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Oxford University.

Conference: What are Hawking dots? Do they reveal an “eon” Universe before the Big Bang?

New observations reveal the presence of several anomalously hot spots, each about 8 times the diameter of the full moon, in the cosmic microwave background. They are very difficult to explain in conventional cosmology. However, such spots are a clear consequence of a new cosmological model that proposes the existence of a phase of the universe – a previous “eon” – in which supermassive black holes would have evaporated according to a famous process predicted by Stephen Hawking.