Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Davies
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: April 22
Cosmologist
Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Paul Charles William Davies
Living
Bible
Region
Drills
Form
Ground
Suggest
Resemble
Life
Spring
Talks
Earliest
Started
Regions
Associate
Millions
Beneath
Eden
Ascended
Hell
Clouds
Fossils
Teeming
Probably
Tiny
Sunny
Fluffy
White
Forms
Associates
Drill

More quotes by Paul Davies

Image
There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.
Paul Davies
Image
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
Image
Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord.
Paul Davies
Image
The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.
Paul Davies
Image
No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.
Paul Davies
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is something behind it all is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists.
Paul Davies
Image
Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.
Paul Davies
Image
The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.
Paul Davies
Image
Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it as a brute fact....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.
Paul Davies
Image
The anthropic principle is an unfortunate name as it implies something about humanity.
Paul Davies
Image
My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.
Paul Davies
Image
Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.
Paul Davies
Image
The development of artificial intelligence may well imply that man will relinquish his intellectual supremacy in favor of thinking machines. With oceans of time available for future innovation, there seems to be no reason why machines cannot achieve and surpass anything of which the human brain is capable.
Paul Davies
Image
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
Image
No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.
Paul Davies
Image
Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity.
Paul Davies
Image
Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.
Paul Davies
Image
Perhaps the best motivation for going to Mars is political. It is obvious that no single nation currently has either the will or the resources to do it alone, but a consortium of nations and space agencies could achieve it within 20 years.
Paul Davies