# Paul Davies - Quotes: 38 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies ## Books - [God and the New Physics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/god-and-the-new-physics.md) — 1 quote - [The Demon in the Machine](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-demon-in-the-machine.md) — 32 quotes - [The Eerie Silence](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-eerie-silence.md) — 1 quote - [The Mind of God](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-davies/the-mind-of-god.md) — 4 quotes ## Recently added quotes > [P]article detectors in De Sitter space respond as if they are immersed in a bath of thermal radiation. However, the stress energy momentum tensor in De Sitter space is not that of thermal radiation. It's just a renormalization of the cosmological constant. So there's something a bit funny about the thermal nature of De Sitter space, and I've been interested in whether you can mine that thermal stuff... > [T]here is... not just [some] new physical law, but a new kind of physical law. ...[W]hat kind of physical law? ...[O]ne idea that Sarah Walker and I have flirted with is state-dependent laws of information. ...[T]ake chess as an analogy ...If you had a modified game of chess in which the rules ...could be updated according to the state of play ...this opens the way to new forms of complexity and new forms of configuration. > We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just [Shannon] bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...[H]azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition. > [I]f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in , could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ...[Perhaps] only if you can create a region of the De Sitter space that is screened out from that horizon... from that thermal nature. If you put a reflective barrier around the demon, you then have De Sitter space, but with the horizon screened out. ...[T]hat's a problem I'm working on now ... > I know of no theorem that tells you... the maximum amount of change that agency can achieve in the universe, and what interests me... is agency at the end of the universe. If you end up in , which has a temperature and a horizon entropy, can you do anything with... those thermal fluctuations? Can you mine them... to extract energy? > If ever you want an example of going from physics to biology, it's the origin of the . > [A]t what point does information, in the physics of matter, cease to just be a thermodynamic issue, and become much more of a control issue? ...[O]ne place ...is the . ...[H]ow did this come into existence? > [C]osmological limits of agency... [W]hat's the best that the universe can do? There's about... 10100k bits of free energy out there. What could be achieved? ... [Egyptian pyramids have] been achieved... Maybe... astro-engineering... [T]ake a galaxy that's rotating clockwise and make it rotate anti-clockwise? ...I suspect ...maybe yes. ...[T]urn the expanding universe into a contracting universe? ...I'm sure the answer is no. > I'm using this term demonic cut by analogy with the Cartesian cut... > Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident. p. 194 > [A] is a set of instructions for ribosome to make a protein. If you look at the DNA sequence that codes for a gene, there's nothing that can tell you, at the sequence level, that if you look at a particular , that this is a bit of functional or coding or contextual information, and it's not just junk. > [W]e... need some new physics. ...The attempt to square the circle by starting out with known physics at the atomic level and somehow life emerging at some higher level... I... don't think we're going to be able to do it without new physics.