Our universe is expanding, so it must have been smaller in the past. Indeed, if we rewind our cosmological movie, we see the universe shrinking back almost to a point – the big bang – some 13.8 billion years ago. Is this when time began? Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity tells us that the backdrop of the universe is a fluid continuum, space-time, in which neither space nor time has an absolute meaning. What's more, at the big bang, space-time distorts into a point of infinite density called a singularity.

Human consciousness is one of the grand mysteries of our time on earth. How do you know that you are "you"? Does your sense of being aware of yourself come from your mind or is it your body that is creating it? What really happens when you enter an "altered" state of consciousness with the help of some chemical or plant? While you would think this basic enigma of our self-awareness would be at the forefront of scientific inquiry, science does not yet have strong answers to these questions.

Can machines (or computers) think? What did Alan Turing have to say to that question? Well, he believed that the question is too "meaningless to answer". "The original question, 'Can machines think?', I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion." In other words, how can we even answer that question if we don't really know what thinking actually is in the first place?

This year's Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to Sir Roger Penrose (1/2), Reinhard Genzel (1/4), and Andrea Ghez (1/4) for their research on Blackhole. Even last year it was in astronomy and cosmology. These are exciting times for astronomy since the last one before that was in 2006. There is a common trait in astronomy and AI. The work started sometime in the 20th century and was not proved then due to the limitation of the technology. And now when the technologies are developed, we are able to provide pieces of evidence.

This was the cauldron into which Sir Roger jumped when he started applying some of the principles trained up in topology - a mathematical concept describing the properties of geometric objects as they are twisted or stretched - to black holes. Before his seminal 1965 paper, models could describe how these objects might form but they were often dismissed as being idealised situations with perfect symmetry that would be unlikely to occur in the "real world".

A double lesson by two masters of thought to understand future scenarios: philosophical, but also practical. Some A.I. scientists believe that one day machines will have consciousness, but Roger Penrose said that would never happen as a machine, no matter how bright it was, would never be aware. A computer can take in data and give out information or new data. It can record light, heat, colour, and can detect taste. It could become so sophisticated that it might even look a human and have thoughts, ideas, emotions, be emphatic, but it would still not be conscious, says Roger Penrose.

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Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious--and quite possibly crackpot--theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant ("One of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius," physicist Lee Smolin has said), we'd be foolish to dismiss their theory out of hand. Penrose, 85, is a mathematical physicist who made his name decades ago with groundbreaking work in general relativity and then, working with Stephen Hawking, helped conceptualize black holes and gravitational singularities, a point of infinite density out of which the universe may have formed. He also invented "twistor theory," a new way to connect quantum mechanics with the structure of spacetime. His discovery of certain geometric forms known as "Penrose tiles"--an ingenious design of non-repeating patterns--led to new directions of study in mathematics and crystallography. The breadth of Penrose's interests is extraordinary, which is evident in his recent book Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe--a dense 500-page tome that challenges some of the trendiest but still unproven theories in physics, from the multiple dimensions of string theory to cosmic inflation in the first moment of the Big Bang. He considers these theories to be fanciful and implausible.

A chess problem could help scientists finally unravel whether quantum theory can explain human consciousness. Sir Roger Penrose created the puzzle to prove the human mind can never be matched by a computer because it exhibits quantum effects. This means the brain doesn't follow the rules for the classical properties of matter, like a computer. Instead, it follows for a new concept of matter altogether that leaves cracks for consciousness and intuition to appear. Now, the Oxford university professor, who has set up a new institute, has invited everyday puzzle enthusiasts to pit their wits against the problem to test his theory.