Paul Davies Quotes

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...

[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.

[I]nformation... has been in physics for a long time, in the most obvious way with Maxwell's demon... It was... just a Gedanken-Experiment... in 1867, but just in recent years, engineers (nanotechnologists) have built real Maxwell demons, and this is now something of a cottage industry.

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

Paul Nurse ...in his visionary essay ..."Life, Logic and Information" extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying... about... the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them... control systems... [an] engineering approach.

This web of information extends beyond individual organisms and communities of organisms to a planetary scale. ...Andrew Kim and Harrison Smith... looked at over 28,000 genomes and... produced this... plot of information being organized on a... planetary scale. ...[T]he biosphere was the original .

[T]hat great information processing system between our ears... probably ...the grandest example we know of... in the universe.

Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right place, at the right time. ...[T]he power of information to sculpt [living] physical forms.

[A]nts... have... collective decision-making... a labyrinth of [network] information exchange... which can profoundly affect the outcome of the colony. We see it... in bird flocking.

[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.

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

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 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.

[M]ax Delbrück... expressed it... (to encapsulate)... [A]t the level of atoms it's just known physics, but at the level of the living cell it's some sort of magic.

[W]e... need some new physics. ...The attempt to square the circle by starting out with known physics at the atomic level and somehow life emerging at some higher level... I... don't think we're going to be able to do it without new physics.