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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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Paul Davies
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: April 22
Cosmologist
Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Paul Charles William Davies
Earth
Fairly
Never
Twice
Would
Discover
Life
Planets
Like
Type
Started
Universe
Teeming
Certain
Inconceivable
More quotes by Paul Davies
It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
Paul Davies
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
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
Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.
Paul Davies
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
We know that within the solar system is very unlikely there will be anything more advanced than microbial life, but if we think outside the solar system and then, the distances are, of course, immense, then there could be Earth-like planets with more advanced form of life.
Paul Davies
If we're thinking about old civilizations, those that formed a long time ago and there were stars and planets around long before Earth even existed, then these are going to be towards the center of the galaxy. That is the place to look if you think there are ancient civilizations that have made beacons or some other way of attracting our attention.
Paul Davies
Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.
Paul Davies
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
The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.
Paul Davies
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
General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.
Paul Davies
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
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
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
Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life - plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
Paul Davies
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
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
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
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