Oxford Mathematics Online Public Lecture in Partnership with Wadham College
Celebrating Roger Penrose’s Nobel Prize

Spacetime Singularities – Roger Penrose, Dennis Lehmkuhl and Melvyn Bragg

Tuesday 16 February 2021
5.00-6.30pm

Dennis Lehmkuhl: From Schwarzschild’s singularity and Hadamard’s catastrophe to Penrose’s trapped surfaces
Roger Penrose: Spacetime singularities – to be or not to be?
Roger Penrose & Melvyn Bragg: In conversation

What are spacetime singularities? Do they exist in nature or are they artefacts of our theoretical reasoning? Most importantly, if we accept the general theory of relativity, our best theory of space, time, and gravity, do we then also have to accept the existence of spacetime singularities?

In this special lecture, Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel Laureate for Physics, will give an extended version of his Nobel Prize Lecture, describing his path to the first general singularity theorem of general relativity, and to the ideas that sprung from this theorem. He will be introduced by Dennis Lehmkuhl whose talk will describe how the concept of a spacetime singularity developed prior to Roger’s work, in work by Einstein and others, and how much of a game changer the first singularity theorem really was.

The lectures will be followed by an interview with Roger by Melvyn Bragg.

Roger Penrose is the 2020 Nobel Laureate for Physics and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor in Oxford
Dennis Lehmkuhl is Lichtenberg Professor of History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn and one of the Editors of Albert Einstein’s Collected Papers
Melvyn Bragg is a broadcaster and author best known for his work as editor and presenter of the South Bank Show and In Our Time

Watch online (no need to register and it will stay online afterwards):
twitter.com/oxunimaths?lang=en
www.facebook.com/OxfordMathematics
livestream.com/oxuni/nobel
www.youtube.com/channel/UCLnGGRG__uGSPLBLzyhg8dQ

The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets