Paul Davies

Quotes

1. [B]iologists... define life in terms of its informational qualities... physicists tend to define life in terms of the physical qualities.

2. 

   s are the way in which... you are thinking and paying attention, because the signals that travel between neurons, down the s, are controlled by the flow of s across the membranes of the axons... [T]hey are, in effect, little demons that sense the incoming signal and open and close the gates; and the ions flow. ...[T]his is so incredibly energy efficient that ...your brain, which is like a megawatt supercomputer, operates with the energy equivalent of a small light bulb.

3. 

   To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!

   p. 31

4. 

   So in effect, information serves as a fuel, and this leads to the whole concept of information engines. Engines that will run on information power...

5. 

   It's now commonplace to have an informational term entering into the fundamental laws of physics as a source of free energy.

6. 

   Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right place, at the right time. ...[T]he power of information to sculpt [living] physical forms.

7. 

   Paul Nurse ...in his visionary essay ..."Life, Logic and Information" extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying... about... the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them... control systems... [an] engineering approach.

8. 

   [M]ax Delbrück... expressed it... (to encapsulate)... [A]t the level of atoms it's just known physics, but at the level of the living cell it's some sort of magic.

   p. 173

9. 

   We lack any sort of device that can... detect life. We don't have a life meter. ...We don't have a general purpose life meter that can detect life as we don't know it.

10. 

    Information in life... amounts to much more than just playing the margins of the , and gaining some... energy advantage. ...I'm calling this a demonic cut. It's much more than just Shannon s at the thermodynamic level. Biological information is... contextual, or functional, or semantic. It depends upon the overall system.

11. 

    [T]he demon... is transferring heat from a colder region to a warmer region in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. ...[A] refrigerator... costs energy to run... but the demon is operating using information instead... The demon... runs without any energy expenditure.

12. 

    Life was onto this... billions of years ago. Life uses many many nano-molecules... in effect, Maxwell demons. Our bodies are full of [them]... doing the business of life. ...not quite perfect ...but they're coming pretty close to the theoretical limit, in terms of energy expenditure.