Top 70 Paul Davies Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.”

— Paul Davies

2. “The Goldilocks Enigma is the idea that everything in the universe is just right for life, like the porridge in the fairy tale.”

— Paul Davies

3. “In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.”

— Paul Davies

4. “The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?”

— Paul Davies

5. “The thing about lucid dreams is that it’s not like the real world where you are constrained by all sorts of things, including the laws of physics-you can do magic.”

— Paul Davies

6. “The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.”

— Paul Davies

7. “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

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8. “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

— Paul Davies

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Technology is, in the broadest sense, mind or intelligence or purpose blending with nature.”

— Paul Davies

12. “Most life on Earth is microbes. we’ve only just scratched the surface of the microbial realm. Probably less than .1% of microbes have been classified let alone cultured or had their genes sequenced, so really that microbial realm is a mystery.”

— Paul Davies

13. “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

14. “We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.”

— Paul Davies

15. “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

16. “The anthropic principle is an unfortunate name as it implies something about humanity.”

— Paul Davies

17. “General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.”

— Paul Davies

18. “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.”

— Paul Davies

19. “Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It’s produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.”

— Paul Davies

20. “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.”

— Paul Davies

21. “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.”

— Paul Davies

22. “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

23. “Most research into life’s murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They’ve tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life’s stupendous complexity.”

— Paul Davies

24. “Cancer is like another form of life. It’s closely related to healthy life. A healthy body is one form of life. Cancer is in a way nature’s experiment with life.”

— Paul Davies

25. “Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term ‘doubting Thomas’ well illustrates the difference.”

— Paul Davies

26. “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.”

— Paul Davies

27. “Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.”

— Paul Davies

28. “To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It’s just amazing what living things can do.”

— Paul Davies

29. “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

30. “To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours is too incredible to be taken seriously.”

— Paul Davies

31. “Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.”

— Paul Davies

32. “My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.”

— Paul Davies

33. “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.”

— Paul Davies

34. “Science is about explaining the world, and religion is about interpreting it. There shouldn’t be any conflict.”

— Paul Davies

35. “Is there anything science should not try to explain? Science is knowledge and knowledge is power – power to do good or evil. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.”

— Paul Davies

36. “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.”

— Paul Davies

37. “When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.”

— Paul Davies

38. “Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that NASA’s budget is too small for the job.”

— Paul Davies

39. “Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply ‘given,’ elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.”

— Paul Davies

40. “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

41. “If we knew we were not alone in the universe it would have a very, very deep impact on our worldview, on our understanding of our place in the universe.”

— Paul Davies

42. “Even if we don’t have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.”

— Paul Davies

43. “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.”

— Paul Davies

44. “For me, science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.”

— Paul Davies

45. “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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46. “Ultimate questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is.”

— Paul Davies

47. “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

48. “The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life’s origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.”

— Paul Davies

49. “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

50. “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.”

— Paul Davies