"The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself"
About this Quote
Penrose is smuggling a philosophy of reality into what sounds like a craft-room instruction: take two shapes, try to cover the plane, make the colors line up. The punchline lands with a physicist's relish for constraint: the rules don't merely allow novelty, they force it. "The only way" turns aesthetic surprise into inevitability. You're not choosing an exotic pattern; you're discovering that a simple local demand (matching colors at edges) can make global repetition impossible.
The intent sits at the crossroads of math, perception, and physics. Penrose tilings - the quiet celebrity behind this line - showed that you can get order without periodicity: a structure that looks coherent at every scale but never settles into the comfort of a repeating wallpaper. In the 1970s, that was more than a geometric parlor trick. It was a rebuttal to an intuition baked into crystallography and everyday common sense: that symmetry and order mean repetition. A decade later, quasicrystals made the subtext literal in matter.
What makes the quote work is its bait-and-switch between the modest and the metaphysical. "Colour the plane" is childlike, almost casual; "never repeats itself" is existential. Penrose is pointing to emergence: how strict local laws can generate infinite non-redundant complexity, a thought that echoes from tilings to computation to theories of how physical law might produce the rich, non-repeating textures of the world. The unease is the point: the universe may be lawful without being predictable in the comforting, loopable way we prefer.
The intent sits at the crossroads of math, perception, and physics. Penrose tilings - the quiet celebrity behind this line - showed that you can get order without periodicity: a structure that looks coherent at every scale but never settles into the comfort of a repeating wallpaper. In the 1970s, that was more than a geometric parlor trick. It was a rebuttal to an intuition baked into crystallography and everyday common sense: that symmetry and order mean repetition. A decade later, quasicrystals made the subtext literal in matter.
What makes the quote work is its bait-and-switch between the modest and the metaphysical. "Colour the plane" is childlike, almost casual; "never repeats itself" is existential. Penrose is pointing to emergence: how strict local laws can generate infinite non-redundant complexity, a thought that echoes from tilings to computation to theories of how physical law might produce the rich, non-repeating textures of the world. The unease is the point: the universe may be lawful without being predictable in the comforting, loopable way we prefer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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