Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff

The line above is how their claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.

Penrose proved mathematically that black holes are a general consequence of Einstein's general relativity, work recognized with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Penrose argued some aspects of consciousness can't arise from ordinary computation and proposed a gravity-linked collapse of quantum states as its physical basis. Hameroff, drawing on how anesthetics switch off awareness, proposed microtubules inside neurons as the site; they combined the ideas.

Physicist Max Tegmark calculated that quantum superpositions in microtubules would lose coherence in about 10 to the negative 13 seconds, far too fast to influence neural processes, concluding the proposed mechanism could not work as described.

Hagan, Hameroff and physicist Jack Tuszynski published a rebuttal in Physical Review E arguing Tegmark's calculation used an oversimplified model of microtubule structure, and that shielding from the surrounding water could extend the coherence time considerably. Most physicists remained unconvinced.

An independent team at Wellesley College found that a microtubule-stabilizing drug delayed anesthetic-induced unconsciousness in rats by about a minute, a peer-reviewed result consistent with microtubules playing some role in anesthesia, without confirming any quantum mechanism.

Penrose's black-hole mathematics remains foundational, separate physics, Nobel-recognized in 2020. Orch-OR itself has no accepted mechanism and remains a minority position; independent replication of the newest results, and a settled explanation for them, are still ongoing.