Paul Davies is an English physicist, a broadcaster, a professor in Arizona State University, and the director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at ASU.

Davies has published over two-dozen books, all of which display his enthusiasm and excitement about scientific progress in our time.

His first book The Physics of Time Asymmetry, in 1974, explored the "arrow of time." In the 1977 second edition Davies cited David Layzer's 1975 article The Arrow of Time in Scientific American. That article and Layzer's 1989 book Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe are critical for understanding Davies' latest thinking on the origin of life.

Nine years later, Davies' 1983 book God and the New Physics was a landmark. It argued that the new twentieth-century physics of relativity and quantum mechanics "is pointing the way to a new appreciation of man and his place in the universe." (p.xii) In particular, Davies explores the theologian's view that life is the supreme miracle, and human life represents the crowning achievement of God's cosmic masterpiece." (p.58). He also tackles the perennial problem of free will and determinism, writing...

When Newton invented his laws of mechanics, many people took this to be the death of the freewill concept. According to Newton's theory, the universe is like a giant clockwork, unwinding along a rigid, pre-determined pathway towards an unalterable final state. The course of every atom is presumed to be legislated and decided in advance, laid down since the beginning of time. Human beings were seen as nothing but component machines caught up irresistibly in this colossal cosmic meclianism. Then along came the new physics with its relativity of time and space and its quantum uncertainty. The whole issue of freedom of choice and determinism went back into the melting pot.

There seems to be a fundamental antagonism between the two theories that constitute the foundations of the new physics. On the one hand, the quantum theory endows the observer with a vital role in the nature of physical reality; as we have seen, many physicists claim that there is concrete experimental evidence against the notion of 'objective reality'. This appears to offer human beings a unique ability to influence the structure of the physical universe in a way that was undreamt in Newton's day. On the other hand, the theory of relativity, which demolishes the concept of a universal time, and an absolute past, present and future, conjures up a picture of a future that in some sense already exists, and so cuts from under our feet the victory won with the help of the quantum factor. If the future is there, does it not mean that we are powerless to alter it?

God and the New Physics, p.135

In 1986, Davies published The Ghost in the Atom, a transcription of interviews by Davies on BBC Radio 3 with eight physicists, including John Bell and David Bohm, discussing new experiments investigating the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, Bell's Theorem, and Quantum Entanglement.

Davies also again discusses the problem of free will and determinism...

With the discovery of quantum mechanics, a number of people, most notably Arthur Eddington, belived they had overcome this impasse. Becau quantum systems are inherently indeterministic, the mechanistic picture of all physical systems, including the brain, is known to be false. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle usually permits a range of possible outcomes for any given physical state, and it is easy to conjecture that consciousness, or mind, could have a vote in deciding which of the available alternatives is actually realized.

Picture, then, an electron in some brain cell that is critically tuned to fire. Quantum mechanics allows the electron to roam over a range of trajectories. Perhaps it only needs the mind to load the quantum dice a little, thus prodding the electron more favourably in a certain direction, for the brain cell to fire, initiating a whole cascade of dependent electrical activity, culminating in, say, the raising of an arm.

Whatever its appeal, the idea that mind finds its expression in the world by courtesy of the quantum uncertainty principle is not really taken very seriously, not least because the electrical activity of the brain seems to be more robust than that. After all, if brain cells operate at the quantum level, the entire network is vulnerable to random maverick quantum fluctuations by any one of myriads of electrons.

The Ghost in the Atom, p.33

In 1992 Davies published The Mind of God:The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. He writes...

I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that l cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. : There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level "God" is a matter of taste and definition. Furthermore, I have come to the point of view that mind, i.e. , conscious awareness of the world, is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolutely fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.

The Mind of God, p.16

In 1994 Davies and two colleagues edited the volume Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry. Davies contributed the article, "Stirring up Trouble." Without mentioning David Layzer's "Arrow of Time" article or Layzer's 1989 book on the Growth of Order, Davies coins the term "entropy gap" to describe Layzer's insight that the maximum possible entropy goes up faster than the actual entropy.

Does this transition from equilibrium to disequilibrium not constitute a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? No. What has happened is depicted in Fig. 3. At some time around one second, the material content of the universe was in a state of equilibrium, having the maximum possible entropy for the constraints at that time. As the universe expanded, however, the maximum possible entropy rose. The actual entropy also rose, but less fast. In particular, the relaxation time for nuclear processes to allow the cosmological material to keep pace with the changing constraints (due to the expansion) was much longer than the expansion time, so the material began to lag further and further behind equilibrium conditions ( equilibrium meaning in the nuclear case that this material is in the form of the, most stable element - iron). Hence an 'entropy gap' opened up. The continuing expansion of the universe serves to try and widen that gap slightly (though now through other processes than nucleosynthesis), while physical processes such as starlight production serves to try and narrow it.

It is important to realise that the crucial effect of the expansion was in the early universe - hence the sudden widening of the gap early on. Today it seems likely (though I haven't checked) that the gap is narrowing: the universe produces copious quantities of entropy at a rate which I imagine is faster than the (now rather feeble) expansion raises the maximum possible entropy. The actual entropy will presumably asymptote toward the maximum possible entropy in the very far future.

Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry, p.33

It's surprising that Davies suggests (though he hasn't checked!) that the entropy gap will close, leading to the 19th-century Kelvin-Helmholtz "heat death of the universe." David Layzer had no such pessimism.

It is likely that Davies' investigation of spirituality in God and the New Physics, his 1992 book The Mind of God, and others, led to Davies being awarded the one-million dollar Templeton Prize in 1995.

In 1999 Davies was a critical member of a research symposium at the Santa Fe Institute on the topic "Complexity, Information, and Design." Several participants were founders of the Santa Fe Institute, including Stuart Kauffman. Sir John Templeton attended the conference personally.

Davies wrote the introduction and a key article for the resulting 2003 book From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning, which was edited by fellow Templeton grantee and theologian Niels Hendrik Gregersen.

The "meaning" in the title is the meaning or purpose of life before life appeared in the universe. The "design" in the subtitle is "Intelligent Design" or Creationism.

The "complexity" in the title was likely first described in Herbert Spencer's 1857 essay, "Progress: Its Law and Cause." Herbert Simon developed complexity further in computer terms in his 1982 book Sciences of the Artificial and his essay The architecture of complexity.

Complexity was made still more famous by Ilya Prigogine's 1984 book, "Order Out Of Chaos. Prigogine argued that complex systems, especially those that show "self-organization," can explain the emergence of life. But Davies thinks something more might be needed for meaning, perhaps God? He writes...

It is a baffling fact that even if the causal route from complexity to life can be explained in the prosaic language of mathematics, the outcome of the prosaic processes indeed does evoke descriptions. Out of the simple arises complexity, a vibrant world of life and sentience, joy and suffering...

In this sense the scientific quest for explaining the route "from complexity to life" provokes a postscientifc quest for the emergence of meaning, "from complexity to consciousness." This is where philosophy and theology may enter the picture. If by philosophical theology we mean the disciplined attempt to rationally evaluate alternative philosophical and religious answers to the question of meaning in a world of emerging complexity, what then are the options available? One way to go would be to stay with the idea of God as the ingenious architect of the world.

From Complexity to Life, pp.13-14

Davies' 1999 symposium likely was the beginning of the Santa Fe Institute's long interest in complex adaptive systems.

A decade later, Davies and Gregersen edited the 2010 book Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics. The writers, more than half theologians, were all said to be "wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle of the universe."

In this insightful book, Davies describes information as a critical part of understanding reality and life itself. He asks...

what happens if we do not assume that the mathematical relations of the so-called laws of nature are the most basic level of description, but rather information is regarded as the foundation which physical realities constructed...instead of taking mathematics to be primary, followed by physics and then information, the picture should be inverted in our explanatory scheme: information > laws of physics > matter.

Information and the Nature of Reality, p.3

In Davies' 2017 book, From Matter to Life: Information and Causality, written with Sara Imari Walker and George F. R. Ellis, God does not appear and all the contributors are scientists. Information is now even more foundational and is given causal power. On page 1, Davies begins with...

The concept of information has penetrated almost all areas of human inquiry, from physics, chemistry, and engineering through biology and the social sciences...If information makes a difference in the physical world which it surely does, then should we not attribute to it causal powers?

From Matter to Life, p.1

Davies defines what he calls the "hard problem of life."

we need to clarify what is meant by the "hard problem of life", that is, to identify which aspects of biology are likely to prove refractory in attempts to reduce them to known physics and chemistry, in the same way that Chalmers identified qualia as central to the hard problem of consciousness. To this end we propose that the hard problem of life is the problem of how "information" can affect the world.

From Matter to Life, p.20

Just two years later, in his 2019 book Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life , Davies doubles down on information as fundamental to understanding life, calling it the "missing link." He writes...

The huge gulf that separates physics and biology – the realm of atoms and molecules from that of living organisms – is unbridgeable without fundamentally new concepts. Living organisms have goals and purposes – the product of billions of years of evolution – whereas atoms and molecules just blindly follow physical laws. Yet somehow the one has to come out of the other. Although the need to reconceptualize life as a physical phenomenon is widely acknowledged in the scientific community, scientists frequently downplay how challenging a full understanding of the nature and origin of life has proved to be.

The search for a ‘missing link’ that can join non-life and life in a unitary framework has led to an entirely new scientific field at the interface of biology, physics, computing and mathematics. It is a field ripe with promise not only for finally explaining life but in opening the way to applications that will transform nanotechnology and lead to sweeping advances in medicine. The unifying concept that underlies this transformation is information, not in its prosaic everyday sense but as an abstract quantity which, like energy, has the ability to animate matter. Patterns of information flow can literally take on a life of their own, surging through cells, swirling around brains and networking across ecosystems and societies, displaying their own systematic dynamics. It is from this rich and complex ferment of information that the concept of agency emerges, with its links to consciousness, free will and other vexing puzzles. It is here, in the way living systems arrange information into organized patterns, that the distinctive order of life emerges from the chaos of the molecular realm.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of information as a cause that can actually make a difference in the world. Very recently, laws that interweave information, energy, heat and work have been applied to living organisms, from the level of DNA, through cellular mechanisms, up to neuroscience and social organization, extending even to a planetary scale. Looking through the lens of information theory, the picture of life that emerges is very far from the traditional account of biology, which emphasizes anatomy and physiology.

The Demon in the Machine, pp.1-2

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