>Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist ... That statement surprised me! Google told me that according to this bio

>Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist ... That statement surprised me! Google told me that according to this biography by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson [0], Roger Penrose in a debate with Stephen Hawking in 1994 self-described as a realist rather than a Platonist. They quote Penrose as follows: >At the beginning of this debate Stephen said that he thinks that he is a positivist, whereas I am a Platonist. I am happy with him being a positivist, but I think that the crucial point here is, rather, that I am a realist. Also, if one compares this debate with the famous debate of Bohr and Einstein, some seventy years ago, I should think that Stephen plays the role of Bohr, whereas I play Einstein's role! For Einstein argued that there should exist something like a real world, not necessarily represented by a wave function, whereas Bohr stressed that the wave function doesn't describe a "real" microworld but only "knowledge" that is useful for making predictions. [0] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Penrose/ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Penrose/