His book L’Esprit, l’Ordinateur et les Lois de la physique (Interéditions, 1993) is a model of its kind, offering deep insight into the author’s original thinking and scientific ideas.
Less well known is Penrose’s close involvement with the Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy **(**), where he has served as one of the honorary presidents since its founding. Established in 2007, this British charitable foundation grew out of a project pursued by its director, physicist Michael Wright, since 1973. Its aim is to create audio and video archives of thousands of lectures, conferences, seminars, courses, discussions and interviews, both formal and informal, given by leading academics and tirelessly recorded for nearly fifty years by Wright and his team as they traveled the world.
To date, the Archive Trust holds more than forty thousand such documents, together with over two hundred and fifty thousand pages of transcripts, lecture notes and correspondence. Pure mathematics and theoretical physics make up the bulk of the collection, which also covers philosophy, cosmology, the history of science and more. At least twenty percent of the archives are in French.
Digitizing and cataloguing this material, and indexing it with relevant metadata, is a considerable undertaking that requires substantial funding. Ultimately, the entire archive is intended to be made freely available to the research community.
