Paul Davies Quotes

The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown.

It's now commonplace to have an informational term entering into the fundamental laws of physics as a source of free energy.

So in effect, information serves as a fuel, and this leads to the whole concept of information engines. Engines that will run on information power...

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.

I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate.

[T]here is... not just [some] new physical law, but a new kind of physical law. ...[W]hat kind of physical law? ...[O]ne idea that Sarah Walker and I have flirted with is state-dependent laws of information. ...[T]ake chess as an analogy ...If you had a modified game of chess in which the rules ...could be updated according to the state of play ...this opens the way to new forms of complexity and new forms of configuration.

[T]his is something that can't be defined locally. It's got to be defined globally, in the context of the system as a whole. ...[T]hat's a very difficult thing for physicists to cope with because we're used to formulating all our laws of physics as local laws, and not as global laws.

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.

[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.

Science, it is usually believed, helps us to build a picture of objective reality – the world 'out there'. With the advent of the quantum theory, that very reality appears to have crumbled, to be replaced by something so revolutionary and bizarre that its consequences have not yet been properly faced.

Information in life... amounts to much more than just playing the margins of the , and gaining some... energy advantage. ...I'm calling this a demonic cut. It's much more than just Shannon s at the thermodynamic level. Biological information is... contextual, or functional, or semantic. It depends upon the overall system.

What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"...

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

The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God.

In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics;it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night.