Interesting anecdote about Roger Penrose as told by Carlo Rovelli

image credit: F. Viadotto

The highlight of the “Twistors and Loops” conference (September 2019) was Roger Penrose’s talk. Carlo Rovelli summarized Penrose’s talk in a CERN Courier article and mentioned this amusing incident:

“The best moment came during Roger Penrose’s talk. Towards the end of a long and dense presentation of new ideas towards understanding the full space of the solutions of Einstein’s theory using twistors, Roger said rather dramatically that now he was going to present a new big idea that might lead to the twistor version of the full Einstein equations – but at that precise moment the slide projector exploded in a cloud of smoke, with sparks flying. We all thought for a moment that a secret power of the Universe, worried about being unmasked, had interfered. Could allying twistors and loops be dangerous?”