Paul Davies Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown.

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
The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God.

Paul Davies
Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information.

Paul Davies
Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models with approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord.

Paul Davies
That the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence.

Paul Davies
It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in numbers, has been rather carefully thought out...The seemingly miraculous concurrence of these numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design.

Paul Davies
It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.

Paul Davies
Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident.

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
Cancer is such a ruthless adversary because it behaves as if it has its own fiendishly cunning agenda.

Paul Davies
Technology is, in the broadest sense, mind or intelligence or purpose blending with nature.

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
Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

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
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
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
Science, it is usually believed, helps us to build a picture of objective reality – the world 'out there'. With the advent of the quantum theory, that very reality appears to have crumbled, to be replaced by something so revolutionary and bizarre that its consequences have not yet been properly faced.

Paul Davies
The heart of the scientific method is the problem-hypothesis-test process. And, necessarily, the scientific method involves predictions. And predictions, to be useful in scientific methodology, must be subject to test empirically.

Paul Davies
In other words, there is more to a message than merely its information content; there is also the value or quality of the information that has to be taken into account.

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
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
The belief that the underlying order of the world can be expressed in mathematical form lies at the very heart of science. So deep does this belief run that a branch of science is considered not to be properly understood until it can be cast in mathematics.

Paul Davies
If there is a purpose to the universe, and it achieves that purpose, then the universe must end, for its continued e xistence would be gratuitous and pointless. Conversely, if the universe endures forever, it is hard to i magine that there is any ultimate purpose to the universe at all.

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