166 Quotes by Paul Davies

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental ‘superlaws,’ but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

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.

Each person who understands him- or herself in this way, as a spark of the divine, with some small part of the divine power, integrally interwoven into the process of the creation of the psycho-physical universe, will be encouraged to participate in the process of plumbing the potentialities of, and shaping the form of, the unfolding quantum reality that it is his or her birthright to help create.

Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents – radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.

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

If we’re looking for intelligence in the universe I think everybody assumes that this has to start with life and so the question is: “How likely is it that there will be life elsewhere in the universe?”

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.

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.

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