the mystery of life...
By Wendy Cavenett
Going neuron to neuron with a man who seems to have the history of the universe at his fingertips is not as daunting as it sounds. Wendy Cavenett went there and came back. In this exclusive interview, PAUL DAVIES, author of numerous books including The Mind of God, and now The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life, they discuss the discovery of ‘living fossils’ beneath the Earth’s surface, the possibility of life on Mars and why the origin of information is crucial to unlocking the mystery of biogenesis.
Speaking with Davies almost makes the bad memories of the final year physics and chemistry classes disappear. Hardly the dry, high-brow scientist, he’s a witty conversationalist and gives science a tasty edge in the frenetic cosmic chowdown.
As Albert Einstein once said, ‘the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.’ Davies is arguably one of the most prominent and successful academics in the public arena because he makes science-talk clear, logical, and yes, fascinating.
He’s a popular presence in a way few theoretical physicists can ever hope to be, often seen talking with Phillip Adams on television programs such as The Big Questions and More Big Questions.
“When I was younger, I was like most teenagers,” he insists. “I would lie awake at night and worry about such things as ‘What will happen when I die?’, ‘Why am I me and not somebody else? and ‘Why am I living now? and ‘Does the universe go on forever?’ and all these deep questions that I think puzzle all youngsters.
“Well most people grow out of it and I never did. I still ask those questions today and I’m still not sure if I have the answers. It just seemed to me that going into science and in particular, Theoretical Physics, was the best way of tackling them, to ask these questions in the context of my scientific work.”
Davies also admits to being a deeply religious man. Although the religion he envisages within his own version of the cosmic order is based on a deep reverence for nature. He has met the Pope [John Paul II] and the Dalai Lama, has been described by The Washington Times as “the best science writer either side of the Atlantic” and is the author of more than 20 books. With his exploration of the philosophical as well as the scientific, Davies has won numerous awards including the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1995 for progress in religion.
Admittedly, Davies’ latest book, The Fifth Miracle, is a challenging read. He not only presents questions, he points to something much rarer. The answers.
The Fifth Miracle provides a fascinating portal into current theories surrounding the origins of life—think of humanity descending, like every other living creature, from one ancestral single-celled organism, or imagine life starting not once but twice in our own star system.
The more radical streams of thought regarding the origins of life, or biogenesis as the scientists say, defy the wildest sci-fi. Life could have been deposited on Earth from a stray meteorite from space or could have begun not on Earth’s surface, but beneath it.
The discovery of ‘superbugs’ or ‘living fossils’ deep below the surface of our planet has fuelled such speculation; it is even thought life could exist under the surface of Mars in a similar fashion. Some of these subsurface ‘superbugs’ could, writes Davies, be “relics of an ancient biology” which, if studied, could yield some of the evolutionary secrets about the origin of life. Davies is almost certain that there was life on Mars and believes it still may exist there today, “if you know where to look” that is. Beneath the planet’s surface is his best bet.
“Since the time of Darwin,” writes Davies in The Fifth Miracle, “there have been only two broad theories of biogenesis. The first is that life began by chemical self-assembly in a water medium somewhere on the Earth’s surface—Darwin himself wrote of a ‘warm little pond’.
“The other is that life came to Earth from space in the form of already-viable microbes—the so-called panspermia hypothesis. In recent years, however, the evidence has increasingly suggested to me a third alternative; that life began inside Earth … several kilometres down in the solid crust, probably beneath the seabed.”
This is science in the late 20th century. Less than five decades ago, these thoughts would have been considered more fiction than science, but living with what physicist J.D. Bernal described as the 20th century ‘Scientific-Technical Revolution’ (‘only in our time has science come to dominate industry and agriculture’), our new world culture is practically fuelled by what our scientists and technologists can achieve.
Commenting on the progress of the last 50 years, historian Eric Hobsbawn puts it this way: ‘To the best of my knowledge there has not been another period when human society has been so profoundly transformed in a matter of decades.’
When [former] US President Bill Clinton announced to the world in 1996 that an ancient Martian meteorite found in Antarctica might contain evidence to support the theory of life existing on Mars, the public’s imagination was captured by science like never before; the possibility that science may have discovered extraterrestrial life—no matter what form—eclipsed every space triumph before it. And despite the questionable authenticity of the specimen since that announcement, to scientists this speculation added impetus to the notion that life on Earth may have been introduced from another planet.
It is believed the Big Bang occurred some three billion years ago. But a scientific recreation of the actual events of that primordial time have seemed downright impossible. Until now. With advances in laboratory techniques, the increasing understanding of the solar system and with a modern cosmology emerging, solving one of the most puzzling questions in human history is not, says Davies, that unattainable.
It is difficult to know which ancient civilisation first questioned the nature of the universe. Some believe it was the Babylonians who understood the would to be a huge mountain rising from the sea with a domed sky hanging from above. The sun would enter from a door in the morning and leave by another at night.
Others look to the Ancient Greeks whose astounding contribution to philosophy, natural sciences, the arts and economics is still felt today. It was Plato who said in Republic that ‘Our argument is about no ordinary matter, but about the way we ought to live our lives.’
To the Ancient Greeks, the mind was the key to progress and from that view, it evolved new beliefs about what human life was for. Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher and scientist wrote in Politics, ‘Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose.’ He saw the Earth at the centre of an eternal universe and believed, like many Babylonians, it a stationary planet with everything else revolving around it. In his teachings, everything below the orbit of the Moon was composed of earth, air, fire and water and everything above composed of ether.
“The problem of how and where life began is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science,” writes Davies. “But it’s more than that. The story of life’s origin has ramifications for philosophy and even religion. Answers to such profound questions as to whether we are the only sentient beings in the universe, whether life is a product of random accident or deeply rooted law, and whether there may be some sort of deep meaning to our existence, hinge on what science can reveal about the formation of life.”
In the last 10 to 15 years, popular science has found an increasing audience in popular culture. While Quantum Physics and the Laws of Thermodynamics may not be on the lips of every person, most understand the Big Bang, the notion of black holes and have watched with interest images from space being beamed back to Earth. Stephen Hawking and the late Carl Sagan have also offered different faces to science and as we discover more about our universe, natural curiosity becomes a powerful impetus for increased understanding.
The fifth miracle, according to the Book of Genesis, is the origin of life itself. When you consider that a human being contains about 100,000 times more atoms than there are stars in the universe, answering the question of how we—and indeed every living organism—began, seems an overwhelming task. If it’s true that we may have evolved from one ancestral cell, how did the complexity of producing the billions of atoms in one human body occur? The fact that there is a complex ordering of information—the DNA and genetic data needed to produce the green eyes, brown hair, five fingers and toes etc—does seem miraculous.
According to Davies, this is where science now faces the biggest challenge; that is, to find out what caused the intense ordering of information needed to produce functioning, complex organisms. In The Fifth Miracle, he suggests that information is a “genuine physical quantity” that has as much reality as the cells it operates, and discovering the origin and nature of such information is a major key to the origins of life.
“Yes, that’s a bit of a wild one,” he admits, “but it’s one that seems to be increasingly fashionable. We talk about information as if it’s a quantity that can be traded; and it is traded in the literal sense. Today, people do pay for information and it is treated as a commodity. Yet it is something which is abstract, something I think is deeply mysterious.
“In physics, it’s impossible to contemplate a gene without agreeing that it must be a message or instruction and therefore it is not only information but it is information that has some sort of meaning, there’s a context to it. I think that is an extraordinary thing and you want to know where that information’s come from and where that context has come from.”
Davies says the atoms and molecules which encode this information are themselves just “stupid particles which push and pull on their neighbours as though subject to blind and purposeful forces.” Yet out of this strange ordering of particles, comes something with a message, an ordered form of information that is the ‘purposeful force’.
It is important not to confuse the “medium with the message”, that is, not to confuse the atom themselves with the information they contain. The big mystery is how that information has evolved.
Davies has spoken to fellow scientists and philosophers and all agree, we have a lot to learn about the nature of information, “and the origin of information,” he adds, “and also how it comes up in different contexts. There are even those people who think that perhaps we’ve got it all around the wrong way; that instead of thinking of the world as made up out of these stupid atoms that blunder around, and that information is some sort of refined property, that maybe information is actually the primitive concept and that atoms are derived from that, so that underpinning everything is information and that information presents itself in a certain way in the form of a particle.”
It’s a inversion that would see the chemical functionings of an atom as secondary; the information controlling it becoming the fundamental ingredient to life as we know it. It’s like the computer, an interesting analogy in itself and one that Davies discusses, but with reservations. To think of the cell as the computer hardware, and the cellular information as the computer software is something everyone can imagine. Knowing that neither can function without the other yet realising it is the computer software that ultimately gives the instructions, the question of a cosmic cellular programmer comes into the equation.
“I think what we have with the computer is more than analogy,” says Davies. “People tend to say, ‘Well, what is life?’ and they have tended to think in terms of chemistry; they think the secret of life lies within exotic chemistry, but I don’t think it does. I think that life is essentially an information propagating and storing process system. It’s that informational aspect that is the key. It’s the software, not the hardware. Like with a computer, there has to be some medium on which that information is etched so of course we have to have the hardware but to balance my enthusiasm with this analogy is that in every age one will take the latest piece of technology of that age and use it as a metaphor for the universe as a whole or for everything you see.
“The pinnacle of technology for the Greeks was the ruler and compass and they discovered the rules of geometry and then offered to build the whole universe out of geometrical forms … then in Newton’s time, it was the clockwork mechanisms, so he built the mechanistic view of the universe; the universe as gigantic clockwork. Then the steam-engine became the pinnacle of technology and we had the universe that was like a heat engine slowing running down, and now we have the computer and it’s very fashionable to think that nature is really a computational process. But we must ask ourselves, are we just falling into that trap of capturing just some aspect of nature using the metaphor that is most fashionable? But having said that, I really do think that whilst it might be straining credulity to apply computations through the entire universe, that is to think of the entire cosmos as a gigantic computer … I think when it comes to life, we’re on pretty secure ground.
“When you look at the architecture of a computer, it’s essential internal logic that operates it. It’s exactly the same with DNA, RNA proteins, which is where cellular information is stored.”
Born in London in 1946, Davies obtained a doctorate from the University College London in 1970 and held academic appointments at Cambridge and London Universities until he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University upon Tyne when he was 34.
Emigrating to Australia in 1990 to work firstly as Chair of Mathematical Physics and then Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Davies resigned last year [1997] to concentrate on his scientific research and various popular science commitments.
Asked how a scientist accommodates both science and religion, Davies points to the origins of science—being theology—and his own personal view of religion and God. He also alludes to the fact that the division between science and religion was damaging but not as severe as most think. “I think it was an artificial schism,” he says, “because the arts has always been inspired by ideas in science and vice versa.
“The power of science is that once you’ve learnt the rules, you can go ahead and apply them without any divine guidance. You don’t have to scour the Bible to work out the force between two electrons and you won’t get any help from the Koran if you’re interested in what happens inside a black hole. I believe the connection between science and God or science and spirituality is not in the workings of the everyday world, the world of nature itself, but in the underlying, law-like order.
“I think many people make the mistake of looking for God in the Big Bang. They think, well somebody must have started it all off; God was there at the beginning and pushed a metaphorical button and made the universe go bang.
“They think God acts as the originating event, but that I find very offensive both theologically and scientifically because it reduces God to just a meddling influence, a fitful cosmic magician who for most of the time is happy to sit back and let his creation unfold but from time to time, intervenes and prods atoms around.
“When I use the word God, I used it very circumspectly and I tend to use it more in the sense of the rational ground on which the law-like order of the universe is built.”
Davies has attended two conventions at the Vatican Observatory. One concerned the Big Bang and the physics of biogenesis while the other was about evolution and the emergence of complexity. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke on both occasions, addressing the various themes with an openness that many would find surprising. According to Davies, the Pope not only accepts the notion of the Big Bang but believes the theory of evolution to be much more than just a theory; he believes it to be the truth.
As for solving the origin of life, Davies admits he did a complete u-turn when writing The Fifth Miracle. He still believes we will find the answer, but despite assurances that we are close, Davies thinks there is still much to be discovered before science has the answer.
“When I set out to write the book,” he concludes, “I was quite convinced that we were pretty close to answering the question about the origin of life and that scientists were pretty close to making life in the laboratory. Many scientists still think we are close but I’ve reversed my opinion; I now think that nothing we know—none of the laws of physics and chemistry that I know of—makes life inevitable, so given our current understanding of physics and chemistry, the origin of biological information is still a mystery.”
But not, hopefully, for long.
Speaking with Davies almost makes the bad memories of the final year physics and chemistry classes disappear. Hardly the dry, high-brow scientist, he’s a witty conversationalist and gives science a tasty edge in the frenetic cosmic chowdown.
As Albert Einstein once said, ‘the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.’ Davies is arguably one of the most prominent and successful academics in the public arena because he makes science-talk clear, logical, and yes, fascinating.
He’s a popular presence in a way few theoretical physicists can ever hope to be, often seen talking with Phillip Adams on television programs such as The Big Questions and More Big Questions.
“When I was younger, I was like most teenagers,” he insists. “I would lie awake at night and worry about such things as ‘What will happen when I die?’, ‘Why am I me and not somebody else? and ‘Why am I living now? and ‘Does the universe go on forever?’ and all these deep questions that I think puzzle all youngsters.
“Well most people grow out of it and I never did. I still ask those questions today and I’m still not sure if I have the answers. It just seemed to me that going into science and in particular, Theoretical Physics, was the best way of tackling them, to ask these questions in the context of my scientific work.”
Davies also admits to being a deeply religious man. Although the religion he envisages within his own version of the cosmic order is based on a deep reverence for nature. He has met the Pope [John Paul II] and the Dalai Lama, has been described by The Washington Times as “the best science writer either side of the Atlantic” and is the author of more than 20 books. With his exploration of the philosophical as well as the scientific, Davies has won numerous awards including the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1995 for progress in religion.
Admittedly, Davies’ latest book, The Fifth Miracle, is a challenging read. He not only presents questions, he points to something much rarer. The answers.
The Fifth Miracle provides a fascinating portal into current theories surrounding the origins of life—think of humanity descending, like every other living creature, from one ancestral single-celled organism, or imagine life starting not once but twice in our own star system.
The more radical streams of thought regarding the origins of life, or biogenesis as the scientists say, defy the wildest sci-fi. Life could have been deposited on Earth from a stray meteorite from space or could have begun not on Earth’s surface, but beneath it.
The discovery of ‘superbugs’ or ‘living fossils’ deep below the surface of our planet has fuelled such speculation; it is even thought life could exist under the surface of Mars in a similar fashion. Some of these subsurface ‘superbugs’ could, writes Davies, be “relics of an ancient biology” which, if studied, could yield some of the evolutionary secrets about the origin of life. Davies is almost certain that there was life on Mars and believes it still may exist there today, “if you know where to look” that is. Beneath the planet’s surface is his best bet.
“Since the time of Darwin,” writes Davies in The Fifth Miracle, “there have been only two broad theories of biogenesis. The first is that life began by chemical self-assembly in a water medium somewhere on the Earth’s surface—Darwin himself wrote of a ‘warm little pond’.
“The other is that life came to Earth from space in the form of already-viable microbes—the so-called panspermia hypothesis. In recent years, however, the evidence has increasingly suggested to me a third alternative; that life began inside Earth … several kilometres down in the solid crust, probably beneath the seabed.”
This is science in the late 20th century. Less than five decades ago, these thoughts would have been considered more fiction than science, but living with what physicist J.D. Bernal described as the 20th century ‘Scientific-Technical Revolution’ (‘only in our time has science come to dominate industry and agriculture’), our new world culture is practically fuelled by what our scientists and technologists can achieve.
Commenting on the progress of the last 50 years, historian Eric Hobsbawn puts it this way: ‘To the best of my knowledge there has not been another period when human society has been so profoundly transformed in a matter of decades.’
When [former] US President Bill Clinton announced to the world in 1996 that an ancient Martian meteorite found in Antarctica might contain evidence to support the theory of life existing on Mars, the public’s imagination was captured by science like never before; the possibility that science may have discovered extraterrestrial life—no matter what form—eclipsed every space triumph before it. And despite the questionable authenticity of the specimen since that announcement, to scientists this speculation added impetus to the notion that life on Earth may have been introduced from another planet.
It is believed the Big Bang occurred some three billion years ago. But a scientific recreation of the actual events of that primordial time have seemed downright impossible. Until now. With advances in laboratory techniques, the increasing understanding of the solar system and with a modern cosmology emerging, solving one of the most puzzling questions in human history is not, says Davies, that unattainable.
It is difficult to know which ancient civilisation first questioned the nature of the universe. Some believe it was the Babylonians who understood the would to be a huge mountain rising from the sea with a domed sky hanging from above. The sun would enter from a door in the morning and leave by another at night.
Others look to the Ancient Greeks whose astounding contribution to philosophy, natural sciences, the arts and economics is still felt today. It was Plato who said in Republic that ‘Our argument is about no ordinary matter, but about the way we ought to live our lives.’
To the Ancient Greeks, the mind was the key to progress and from that view, it evolved new beliefs about what human life was for. Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher and scientist wrote in Politics, ‘Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose.’ He saw the Earth at the centre of an eternal universe and believed, like many Babylonians, it a stationary planet with everything else revolving around it. In his teachings, everything below the orbit of the Moon was composed of earth, air, fire and water and everything above composed of ether.
“The problem of how and where life began is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science,” writes Davies. “But it’s more than that. The story of life’s origin has ramifications for philosophy and even religion. Answers to such profound questions as to whether we are the only sentient beings in the universe, whether life is a product of random accident or deeply rooted law, and whether there may be some sort of deep meaning to our existence, hinge on what science can reveal about the formation of life.”
In the last 10 to 15 years, popular science has found an increasing audience in popular culture. While Quantum Physics and the Laws of Thermodynamics may not be on the lips of every person, most understand the Big Bang, the notion of black holes and have watched with interest images from space being beamed back to Earth. Stephen Hawking and the late Carl Sagan have also offered different faces to science and as we discover more about our universe, natural curiosity becomes a powerful impetus for increased understanding.
The fifth miracle, according to the Book of Genesis, is the origin of life itself. When you consider that a human being contains about 100,000 times more atoms than there are stars in the universe, answering the question of how we—and indeed every living organism—began, seems an overwhelming task. If it’s true that we may have evolved from one ancestral cell, how did the complexity of producing the billions of atoms in one human body occur? The fact that there is a complex ordering of information—the DNA and genetic data needed to produce the green eyes, brown hair, five fingers and toes etc—does seem miraculous.
According to Davies, this is where science now faces the biggest challenge; that is, to find out what caused the intense ordering of information needed to produce functioning, complex organisms. In The Fifth Miracle, he suggests that information is a “genuine physical quantity” that has as much reality as the cells it operates, and discovering the origin and nature of such information is a major key to the origins of life.
“Yes, that’s a bit of a wild one,” he admits, “but it’s one that seems to be increasingly fashionable. We talk about information as if it’s a quantity that can be traded; and it is traded in the literal sense. Today, people do pay for information and it is treated as a commodity. Yet it is something which is abstract, something I think is deeply mysterious.
“In physics, it’s impossible to contemplate a gene without agreeing that it must be a message or instruction and therefore it is not only information but it is information that has some sort of meaning, there’s a context to it. I think that is an extraordinary thing and you want to know where that information’s come from and where that context has come from.”
Davies says the atoms and molecules which encode this information are themselves just “stupid particles which push and pull on their neighbours as though subject to blind and purposeful forces.” Yet out of this strange ordering of particles, comes something with a message, an ordered form of information that is the ‘purposeful force’.
It is important not to confuse the “medium with the message”, that is, not to confuse the atom themselves with the information they contain. The big mystery is how that information has evolved.
Davies has spoken to fellow scientists and philosophers and all agree, we have a lot to learn about the nature of information, “and the origin of information,” he adds, “and also how it comes up in different contexts. There are even those people who think that perhaps we’ve got it all around the wrong way; that instead of thinking of the world as made up out of these stupid atoms that blunder around, and that information is some sort of refined property, that maybe information is actually the primitive concept and that atoms are derived from that, so that underpinning everything is information and that information presents itself in a certain way in the form of a particle.”
It’s a inversion that would see the chemical functionings of an atom as secondary; the information controlling it becoming the fundamental ingredient to life as we know it. It’s like the computer, an interesting analogy in itself and one that Davies discusses, but with reservations. To think of the cell as the computer hardware, and the cellular information as the computer software is something everyone can imagine. Knowing that neither can function without the other yet realising it is the computer software that ultimately gives the instructions, the question of a cosmic cellular programmer comes into the equation.
“I think what we have with the computer is more than analogy,” says Davies. “People tend to say, ‘Well, what is life?’ and they have tended to think in terms of chemistry; they think the secret of life lies within exotic chemistry, but I don’t think it does. I think that life is essentially an information propagating and storing process system. It’s that informational aspect that is the key. It’s the software, not the hardware. Like with a computer, there has to be some medium on which that information is etched so of course we have to have the hardware but to balance my enthusiasm with this analogy is that in every age one will take the latest piece of technology of that age and use it as a metaphor for the universe as a whole or for everything you see.
“The pinnacle of technology for the Greeks was the ruler and compass and they discovered the rules of geometry and then offered to build the whole universe out of geometrical forms … then in Newton’s time, it was the clockwork mechanisms, so he built the mechanistic view of the universe; the universe as gigantic clockwork. Then the steam-engine became the pinnacle of technology and we had the universe that was like a heat engine slowing running down, and now we have the computer and it’s very fashionable to think that nature is really a computational process. But we must ask ourselves, are we just falling into that trap of capturing just some aspect of nature using the metaphor that is most fashionable? But having said that, I really do think that whilst it might be straining credulity to apply computations through the entire universe, that is to think of the entire cosmos as a gigantic computer … I think when it comes to life, we’re on pretty secure ground.
“When you look at the architecture of a computer, it’s essential internal logic that operates it. It’s exactly the same with DNA, RNA proteins, which is where cellular information is stored.”
Born in London in 1946, Davies obtained a doctorate from the University College London in 1970 and held academic appointments at Cambridge and London Universities until he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University upon Tyne when he was 34.
Emigrating to Australia in 1990 to work firstly as Chair of Mathematical Physics and then Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Davies resigned last year [1997] to concentrate on his scientific research and various popular science commitments.
Asked how a scientist accommodates both science and religion, Davies points to the origins of science—being theology—and his own personal view of religion and God. He also alludes to the fact that the division between science and religion was damaging but not as severe as most think. “I think it was an artificial schism,” he says, “because the arts has always been inspired by ideas in science and vice versa.
“The power of science is that once you’ve learnt the rules, you can go ahead and apply them without any divine guidance. You don’t have to scour the Bible to work out the force between two electrons and you won’t get any help from the Koran if you’re interested in what happens inside a black hole. I believe the connection between science and God or science and spirituality is not in the workings of the everyday world, the world of nature itself, but in the underlying, law-like order.
“I think many people make the mistake of looking for God in the Big Bang. They think, well somebody must have started it all off; God was there at the beginning and pushed a metaphorical button and made the universe go bang.
“They think God acts as the originating event, but that I find very offensive both theologically and scientifically because it reduces God to just a meddling influence, a fitful cosmic magician who for most of the time is happy to sit back and let his creation unfold but from time to time, intervenes and prods atoms around.
“When I use the word God, I used it very circumspectly and I tend to use it more in the sense of the rational ground on which the law-like order of the universe is built.”
Davies has attended two conventions at the Vatican Observatory. One concerned the Big Bang and the physics of biogenesis while the other was about evolution and the emergence of complexity. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke on both occasions, addressing the various themes with an openness that many would find surprising. According to Davies, the Pope not only accepts the notion of the Big Bang but believes the theory of evolution to be much more than just a theory; he believes it to be the truth.
As for solving the origin of life, Davies admits he did a complete u-turn when writing The Fifth Miracle. He still believes we will find the answer, but despite assurances that we are close, Davies thinks there is still much to be discovered before science has the answer.
“When I set out to write the book,” he concludes, “I was quite convinced that we were pretty close to answering the question about the origin of life and that scientists were pretty close to making life in the laboratory. Many scientists still think we are close but I’ve reversed my opinion; I now think that nothing we know—none of the laws of physics and chemistry that I know of—makes life inevitable, so given our current understanding of physics and chemistry, the origin of biological information is still a mystery.”
But not, hopefully, for long.
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This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 1998. Since its publication, Paul Davies has written How To Build A Time Machine (2001), Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained By Its Most Brilliant Teacher (2005) with Richard Phillips Feynman, and most recently, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right For Life (2007).
He has also recently moved to the Arizona State University.
He has also recently moved to the Arizona State University.
A theoretical physicist and cosmologist, he also works in the relatively new area of Astrobiology—"a new field of research that seeks to understand the origin and evolution of life, and to search for life beyond Earth."
For more, visit Davies' webpage @ http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
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