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
No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.

Paul Davies
Conventional science attempts to explain things exactly, in terms of general principles. Any sort of explanation for the shape of a snowflake or a coastline could not be of this sort.

Paul Davies
In each and every one of us lies a message. It is inscribed in an ancient code, its beginnings lost in the mists of time. Decrypted, the message contains instructions on how to make a human being. Nobody wrote the message; nobody invented the code. They came into existence spontaneously. Their designer was Mother Nature herself, working only within the scope of her immutable laws and capitalizing on the vagaries of chance.The message isn't written in ink or type, but in atoms, strung together in an elaborately arranged sequence to form DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the most extraordinary molecule on Earth.

Paul Davies
To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!

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
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
Wheeler hopes that we can discover, within the context of physics, a principle that will enable the universe to come into existence "of its own accord." In his search for such a theory, he remarks: "No guiding principle would seem more powerful than the requirement that it should provide the universe with a way to come into being." Wheeler likened this 'self-causing' universe to a self-excited circuit in electronics.

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
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
I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate.

Paul Davies
What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"...

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

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
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
Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.

Paul Davies
The universe contains vastly more order than Earth-life could ever demand. All those distant galaxies, irrelevant for our existence, seem as equally well ordered as our own.

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

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