Great Throughts Treasury

"So if life can exist under the ground on Earth, maybe it can exist under the ground on Mars, too."

"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."

"So where is God in this story? Not especially in the big bang that starts the universe off, nor meddling fitfully in the physical processes that generate life and consciousness. I would rather that nature can take care of itself. The idea of a God who is just another force or agency at work in nature, moving atoms here and there in competition with physical forces, is profoundly uninspiring. To me, the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life, without the need for the occasional supernatural prod; a lawfulness that produces beings who not only ask great questions of existence, but who, through science and other methods of enquiry, are even beginning to find answers."

"Standard quantum physics says that if you make an observation of something today ? it might just be the position of an atom ? then there?s an uncertainty about what that atom is going to do in the future. And there?s an uncertainty about what it?s going to do in the past. That uncertainty means there?s a type of linkage. Einstein called this ?spooky action at a distance.?"

"The general multiverse explanation is simply naive deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appear to be an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system. Both require an infinite amount of information to be discarded just to explain the (finite) universe we live in."

"The epoch before about a billionth of a second, however, remains murky territory, with plenty of scope for disagreement."

"The increasing application of the information concept to nature has prompted a curious conjecture. Normally we think of the world as composed of simple, clod-like, material particles, and information as a derived phenomenon attached to special, organized states of matter. But maybe it is the other way around: perhaps the universe is really a frolic of primal information, and material objects a complex secondary manifestation."

"The origin of life and consciousness were not interventionist miracles, but nor were they stupendously improbable accidents. They were, I believe, part of the natural outworking of the laws of nature, and as such our existence as conscious enquiring beings springs ultimately from the bedrock of physical existence-those ingenious, felicitous laws. That is the sense in which I wrote in The Mind of God : ?We are truly meant to be here.? I mean ?we? in the sense of conscious beings, not Homo sapiens specifically. Thus although we are not at the center of the universe, human existence does have a powerful wider significance. Whatever the universe as a whole may be about, the scientific evidence suggests that we, in some limited yet ultimately still profound way, are an integral part of its purpose."

"The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. 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."

"The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology."

"The laws [of physics]... seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design."

"The German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, himself one of the founders of the science of thermodynamics, was one of the first to suggest that life somehow circumvents the second law. Eddington likewise perceived a clash between Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics, and suggested either that the former be abandoned or that an "anti-evolution principle" be set alongside it. Even Schrodinger had his doubts. In his book What is Life? he examined the relationship between order and disorder in conventional thermodynamics and contrasted it with life's hereditary principle of more order from order. Observing that an organism avoids decay and maintains order by "drinking orderliness" from its environment, he surmised that the second law of thermodynamics may not apply to living matter. "We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing on it," he wrote."

"The popular image of mathematics as a collection of precise facts, linked together by well-defined logical paths is revealed to be false. There is randomness and hence uncertainty in mathematics, just as there is in physics."

"The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth by about three and a half billion years ago. In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there is plenty of scope for disagreement."

"The position I have presented to you today is radically different. It is one that regards the universe, not as the plaything of a capricious Deity, but as a coherent, rational, elegant, and harmonious expression of a deep and purposeful meaning. I believe the time has now come for those theologians who share this vision to join me and my scientific colleagues to take the message to the people."

"The problem with this neat separation into ?non-overlapping magisteria,? as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn?t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified."

"The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ?constants? were off even slightly. You see,? Davies adds, ?even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life?almost contrived?you might say a ?put-up job?."

"The religious interpretation is that God made the universe just as it is in order that life and conscious beings could emerge. The other way, which I suppose would be anti-religious, is to say that the emergence of life and observers causes the universe to have the laws that it does. In the causal sense, it puts the cart before the horse. It makes the emergence of life and observers later on in the universe have some responsibility for the way the laws come into being at the beginning."

"The strong anthropic principle says that the universe must bring forth life and observers at some stage. So even if there?s only one universe, it must be the case that this universe will end up being observed by beings such as ourselves. Now, that?s much harder for scientists to swallow because it seems to turn everything upside down. Most scientists think that the universe came into existence by some happy coincidence, or maybe from this multiverse selection there were beings who emerged. But these beings don?t play a central role even in the multiverse theory. They don?t play a creative role, whereas in the strong anthropic principle, the observers are in the central position. They are the ones dictating how the universe is put together. And that seems too much for people to swallow. It gives mind and consciousness a central place in the great scheme of things."

"The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don't know it have so far been overlooked."

"The very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships."

"There?s no doubt that the popularity of the multiverse is due to the fact that it superficially gives a ready explanation for why the universe is bio-friendly. Twenty years ago, people didn?t want to talk about this fine-tuning because they were embarrassed. It looked like the hand of a creator. Then along came the possibility of a multiverse, and suddenly they?re happy to talk about it because it looks like there?s a ready explanation. Only those universes in which there can be life get observed, and all the rest go unobserved. Notice, however, that it?s far from a complete explanation of existence. You still have to make a huge number of assumptions. You need a universe-generating mechanism to give you all these universes. You need a set of laws that can be scattered across these universes, distributed in some way, according to some algorithm. You?re no better off than saying there is an unexplained God. Even the scientific explanations for the universe are rooted in a particular type of theological thinking. They?re trying to explain the world by appealing to something outside of it. And I think the time has come to move beyond that. We can ? if we try hard enough ? come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naive theist who says there?s a mysterious, unexplained God."

"The universe is just a big information processor. Wheeler calls this ?it from bit.? Now if you take that view ? that the universe is a gigantic computer ? then it leads immediately to the conclusion that the resources of that computer are limited. The universe is finite. It?s finite because the speed of light is finite. There?s been a finite time since the big bang. So if we have a finite universe, we have a computer with finite resources, and hence, finite accuracy. So once you recognize that the universe is a gigantic computer, then you see that the laws of physics can?t be infinitely precise and perfect. There must be a certain amount of wiggle room or sloppiness or ambiguity in those laws. And the key point here is that the degree of error, which is inherent in the laws, depends on time. As the universe gets older, there are fewer errors because it?s had longer to compute. If you go back to the first split second after the big bang, then the underlying errors in the laws of physics really would have been very large. So instead of thinking of the universe as beginning magically with a bang, and the laws of physics being imprinted magically on the universe with infinite precision right from the word go, we must instead think of the laws as being emergent with and inherent in the universe, starting out a little bit vague and fuzzy, and focusing down over time to the form that we see today."

"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."

"There are indeed a lot of stars -- at least ten billion billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule."

"There's no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being."

"They are working for companies that make huge profits. Some get sick pay and some don't get sick pay but they all have the same size mops and buckets."

"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."

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

"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."

"We can now see that Augustine was right, and popular religion wrong, to envisage God as a super-being dwelling within the stream of time prior to the creation. Professional theologians acknowledge this. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) does not mean God pushing a metaphysical button and making a Big Bang, then sitting back to watch the action. It means God sustaining the existence of the universe, and its laws, at all times, from a location outside of space and time."

"Until now, I've been writing about now as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of actual moments in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the now of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar tick-tock of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go tick-tock at all; it goes tick-tick, every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe tick-tock experience?but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes tock . . . tock . . . tock, whereas a bedside clock chatters away: ticktockticktock... Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry."

"We have to find a framework of ideas that provides ordinary people with some broader context to their lives than just the daily round, a framework that links them to each other, to nature, and to the wider universe in a meaningful way, that yields a common set of principles around which peoples of all cultures can make ethical decisions yet remains honest in the face of scientific knowledge; indeed, that celebrates that knowledge alongside other human insights and inspirations. The scientific enterprise as I have presented it may not return human beings to the center of the universe, it may reject the notion of miracles other than the miracle of nature itself, but it does not make human beings irrelevant either. A universe in which the emergence of life and consciousness is seen, not as a freak set of events, but fundamental to its law-like workings, is a universe that can truly be called our home."

"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."

"Where do we human beings fit into this great cosmic scheme? Can we gaze out into the cosmos, as did our remote ancestors, and declare: ?God made all this for us?? I think not. Are we then but an accident of nature, the freakish outcome of blind and purposeless forces, incidental by-product of a mindless, mechanistic universe? I reject that, too. The emergence of life and consciousness, I maintain, are written into the laws of the universe in a very basic way. True, the actual physical form and general mental make-up of Homo sapiens contain many accidental features of no particular significance. If the universe were rerun a second time, there would be no solar system, no Earth, and no people. But the emergence of life and consciousness somewhere and somewhen in the cosmos is, I believe, assured by the underlying laws of nature."

"Words like ?meaning? and ?purpose? are human categories, derived from human experience, and so we?re projecting them onto nature and saying, well, the best way of understanding the universe is to say it behaves in a purpose-like manner."

"What I?m suggesting ? this is where things depart from the conventional view ? is that the laws of physics themselves are subject to the same quantum uncertainty. So that an observation performed today will select not only a number of histories from an infinite number of possible past histories, but will also select a subset of the laws of physics which are consistent with the emergence of life. That?s the radical departure. It?s not the backward-in-time aspect, which has been established by experiment. There?s really no doubt that quantum mechanics opens the way to linking future with past. I?m suggesting that we extend those notions from the state of the universe to the underlying laws of physics themselves. That?s the radical step, because most physicists regard the laws as God-given, imprinted on the universe, fixed and immutable. But Wheeler ? and I follow him on this ? suggested that the laws of physics are not immutable."

"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."

"You feel good when you kill off a penalty. It's part of the game that can make a big difference."

"You can't teach it in science class. God has never been a part of science."