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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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Paul Davies
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: April 22
Cosmologist
Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Paul Charles William Davies
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More quotes by Paul Davies
To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.
Paul Davies
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
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
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
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
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
I think if we're going to send messages to the stars then it needs a great deal of thought that it's something that should involve the entire not only scientific community, but the entire world community. We need to think very carefully indeed.
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
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
The anthropic principle is an unfortunate name as it implies something about humanity.
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
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
Matter is regarded as being constituted by a region of space in which the field is extremely intense . . . . . . There is no place in this new kind of Physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
Paul Davies
To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours is too incredible to be taken seriously.
Paul Davies
In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
Paul Davies
It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
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
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
The secret of our success on planet Earth is space. Lots of it. Our solar system is a tiny island of activity in an ocean of emptiness.
Paul Davies
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