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The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.

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
Precisely
Basis
Bases
Succeed
Evades
Secret
Succeeds
Lying
Imperatives
Doe
Chemical
Life
Chemicals

More quotes by Paul Davies

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Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.
Paul Davies
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Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.
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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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
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To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.
Paul Davies
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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
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Cancer touches every family in one way or another. As other diseases are brought under control, cancer is set to become the number one killer, and is already in epidemic proportions worldwide.
Paul Davies
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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
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Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.
Paul Davies
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When I was a student almost nobody thought there was any life beyond Earth. Today it's fashionable to say that there is life all over the place, that the universe is teeming with it, but the scientific facts on the ground haven't really changed.
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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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 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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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
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In the frantic search for an elusive 'cure,' few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?
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's always good in science to say Well how do you know that? and Are you really sure? and Could there be an exceptional case?
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
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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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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