Penrose Stairs – Mysterious Paradox of The “Inception”

The last film from talented director Christopher Nolan, “inception” (”Beginning”) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon Levitt Ken Watanabe starring, is a critically acclaimed science fiction and great outlet to the public, which uses a series of philosophical concepts, logical or medical lesser known. One is the paradox of the Penrose stairs.

Penrose stairs appears in two scenes in the film. First, the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Dom Cobb, an “extractor” to enter other people’s dreams and subconscious to obtain secret information, explains his Ariadne (Ellen Page), architect dream world where victims are trapped by Cobb, way through a ladder Penrose can fool dream characters that populate the human subconscious. The second time, in one of the most spectacular sequences of “inception” Cobb’s partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) escape an trackbacks, using an application to Penrose staircase. What is, therefore, the mysterious paradox of the Penrose staircase?

Penrose is an impossible item scale developed by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger. Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898 – 1972) was one of the most reputable physicians in the UK and also geneticist, mathematician and chess. Penrose was among the first researchers in the world who have analyzed the relationship between mental retardation and genetic disease and how it is transmitted across generations. Roger Penrose (born 1931) is a famous British mathematician and physicist, his revolutionary work on understanding the universe, giving it the prestigious Wolf prize, divided into 1988 with another famous physicist – Stephen Hawking. Lionel and Roger Penrose (left and right, photo below) created a scale Penrose Sunday afternoon, while serving a cocktail.

Penrose scale two-dimensional representation of a staircase where the stairs are four angles turns 90 degrees as you ascend and descend in a continuous loop, so a person could climb stairs endlessly without arriving Penrose above. So something is obviously impossible in three sizes – two-dimensional figure reached this paradox through a distorted perspective, distortion of reality which creates optical illusion. One of the most famous artworks Ditrău using Penrose’s scale lithograph “Ascending and Descending” of Maurits Cornelis Escher Dutch artist (1898 – 1972), where paradox is built on the roof of a monastery where monks going up and down endlessly.