Paul Davies Quotes

Seventy-five years ago Erwin Schrödinger published... ... the key point... was whether life can be explained by physics. ...Schrödinger ...said "We must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing..."

[B]iologists... define life in terms of its informational qualities... physicists tend to define life in terms of the physical qualities.

[W]ith the physics of living matter, have we joined... the world of physics with the world of informational biology?

Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident.

That the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence.

To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!

Life was onto this... billions of years ago. Life uses many many nano-molecules... in effect, Maxwell demons. Our bodies are full of [them]... doing the business of life. ...not quite perfect ...but they're coming pretty close to the theoretical limit, in terms of energy expenditure.

[T]he demon... is transferring heat from a colder region to a warmer region in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. ...[A] refrigerator... costs energy to run... but the demon is operating using information instead... The demon... runs without any energy expenditure.

We lack any sort of device that can... detect life. We don't have a life meter. ...We don't have a general purpose life meter that can detect life as we don't know it.

All this prompts the question of why, from the infinite rage of possible values that Nature could have selected for the fundamental constants, and from the infinite variety of initial conditions that could have characterized the primeval universe, the actual values and conditions conspire to produce the particular range of special features that we observe. For clearly the universe is a very special place: exceedingly uniform on a large scale, yet not so precisely uniform that galaxies could not form; extremely low entropy per proton, and hence cool enough for chemistry to happen; almost zero cosmic propulsion and an expansion rate tuned to that energy content to unbelievable accuracy; values for the strengths of its forces that permit nuclei to exist, yet do not burn up all the cosmic hydrogen, and many more apparent accidents of fortune.

The laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind. To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way.

[A]t what point does information, in the physics of matter, cease to just be a thermodynamic issue, and become much more of a control issue? ...[O]ne place ...is the . ...[H]ow did this come into existence?

[I]nformation pervades biology. Your DNA is chock full of encrypted information, and the encryption is really important. But s don't act in isolation. They couple together to form networks, sometimes of great complexity, and information swirls around these networks. It can be stored.... processed... and it can have knock-on effects... beyond individual cells. Even bacteria can signal each other chemically... electrically and mechanically, and so, through physical forces, can exchange information and engage in cooperative behavior, like in s.

The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription, , translation, coding, signals...

We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just <nowiki>[</nowiki>Shannon] bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...[H]azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition.