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I always look on the black side of life. That way, you won't be disappointed and I'm cheerful if it doesn't work out. I'm a cheerful pessimist.

Paul Davies

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Paul Davies
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: April 22
Cosmologist
Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Paul Charles William Davies
Life
Sides
Black
Doesn
Look
Pessimist
Looks
Cheerful
Work
Disappointed
Way
Spring
Always
Side

More quotes by Paul Davies

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The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.
Paul Davies
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If we knew we were not alone in the universe it would have a very, very deep impact on our worldview, on our understanding of our place in the universe.
Paul Davies
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The laws of physics ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The universe must have a purpose.
Paul Davies
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Are we alone in the universe? This is a question which goes back to the dawn of history, but for most of human history it has been in the province of religion and philosophy. Fifty or something years ago, however, it became part of science.
Paul Davies
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Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents - radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.
Paul Davies
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If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets.
Paul Davies
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Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development. The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion.
Paul Davies
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In the 1990s I began to study the prospects that life could spread from Mars to Earth or maybe Earth to Mars and that maybe life began on Mars and came to Earth, and that idea seemed to have a lot of traction and is now accepted as very plausible.
Paul Davies
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No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Paul Davies
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If you get a drill and drill down 5km beneath the ground, it's teeming with life - millions of tiny living fossils. They resemble the earliest life forms and suggest that life started under the Ground. The bible talks of Eden as a sunny parkland with white fluffy clouds, but it probably ascended from the region that we now associate with Hell.
Paul Davies
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It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
Paul Davies
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When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.
Paul Davies
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The anthropic principle is an unfortunate name as it implies something about humanity.
Paul Davies
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A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.
Paul Davies
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Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.
Paul Davies
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The thing about lucid dreams is that it's not like the real world where you are constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics - you can do magic.
Paul Davies
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An argument often given for why Earth couldn't host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life.
Paul Davies
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To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours is too incredible to be taken seriously.
Paul Davies
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The universe contains vastly more order than Earth-life could ever demand. All those distant galaxies, irrelevant for our existence, seem as equally well ordered as our own.
Paul Davies
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For millennia mankind has believed that nothing can come out of nothing. Today we can argue that everything has come out of nothing. Nobody has to pay for the universe. It is the ultimate free lunch.
Paul Davies