Paul Davies Quotes
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The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?
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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.
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Mathematics is universal. It's discovered by human beings, but the rules of mathematics are the same throughout the universe and the laws of the universe.
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The Universe is not a collection of objects, but is an inseparable web of vibrating energy patterns in which no one component has reality independently from the entirety. Included in the entirety is the observer.
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Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street.
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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.
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It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
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It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between.
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The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.
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Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.
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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.
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It is possible that a scientific discovery will be made that humans will later regret because it has awful consequences. The problem is, we probably would not know in advance and, once the discovery is made, it cannot be undiscovered.
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The Goldilocks Enigma is the idea that everything in the universe is just right for life, like the porridge in the fairy tale.
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If we're looking for intelligence in the universe I think everybody assumes that this has to start with life and so the question is: "How likely is it that there will be life elsewhere in the universe?"
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Science may explain the world, but we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us
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In 1911 the little town of Nakhla in Egypt was the scene of one of the most remarkable events in historym when a chunk of rock fell from the sky and killed a dog. This is the only known canine fatality caused by a cosmic object. Improbably though this encounter was already, its truly extraordinary nature was revealed only decades later when scientists found that the culprit was not a common-or-garden meteorite, but a piece of the planet Mars.
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Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.
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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.
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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.
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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.