Paul Davies Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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 tumors use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

Paul Davies
Although gravity is by far the weakest force of nature, its insidious and cumulative action serves to determine the ultimate fate not only of individual astronomical objects but of the entire cosmos. The same remorseless attraction that crushes a star operates on a much grander scale on the universe as a whole.

Paul Davies
The rules of clockwork might apply to familiar objects such as snooker balls, but when it comes to atoms, the rules are those of roulette.

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
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
Holotypes, syntypes, lectotypes, and neotypes are the bearers of the scientific names of all animal taxa. They are the international standards of reference that provide objectivity in zoological nomenclature. They are held in trust for science by all zoologists and by persons responsible for their safe keeping.

Paul Davies
However much we may feel free, everything that we do is, according to Laplace, completely determined. Indeed the entire cosmos is reduced to a gigantic clockwork mechanism, with each component slavishly and unfailingly executing it preprogrammed instructions to mathematical precision. Such is the sweeping implication of Newtonian mechanics.

Paul Davies
For those who think of space as emptiness, the assignment of an adjective, especially one as enigmatic as "curved", might be regarded as cryptic.

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
The incorporation of imaginary elements into physical theories is one of the most difficult practices for a professional physicist to justify to the layman. Of course, if a particular feature, such as isotopic spin symmetry, renders the model a brilliant success, then the physicist can simply reply, "I put it in because it works!"

Paul Davies
It is a striking thought that ten years of radio astronomy have taught humanity more about the creation and organization of the universe than thousands of years of religion and philosophy.

Paul Davies
A model of the universe does not require faith, but a telescope. If it is wrong, it is wrong.

Paul Davies
I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident.... The physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must... be a deeper level of explanation.

Paul Davies
If the number of theorems is larger than one can possibly survey, who can be trusted to judge what is "important?" One cannot have survival of the fittest if there is no interaction.

Paul Davies
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.

Paul Davies
If the Church is largely ignored today it is not because science has finally won its age-old battle with religion, but because it has so radically reoriented our society that the biblical perspective of the world now seems largely irrelevant. As one television cynic recently remarked, few of our neighbors possess an ass for us to covet.

Paul Davies
It is clear that for nature to produce a cosmos even remotely resembling our own, many apparently unconnected branches of physics have to cooperate to a remarkable degree.

Paul Davies
In the everyday world, energy is always unalterably fixed; the law of energy conservation is a cornerstone of classical physics. But in the quantum microworld, energy can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion.

Paul Davies
It is the job of science to solve mysteries without recourse to divine intervention.

Paul Davies
Whether mathematical simplicity is God's affair or our, the fact remains that this feature more than any other remains the mainspring of progress in the physical sciences.

Paul Davies
Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.

Paul Davies
An essential element in all mechanisms of self-organization is feedback.

Paul Davies
Measure for measure, we are to an atom, what a star is to us.

Paul Davies
Relativity physics has shifted the moving present out from the superstructure of the universe, into the minds of human beings, where it belongs.

Paul Davies
Mathematics and beauty are the foundation stones of the universe. No one who has studied the forces of nature can doubt that the world about us is a manifestation of something very, very clever indeed.

Paul Davies
The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

Paul Davies
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
Science remains a sort of witchcraft, its practitioners regarded with a mixture of awe and suspicion...

Paul Davies
A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory.

Paul Davies
The laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind. To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way.

Paul Davies