Paul Davies

Paul C. W. Davies
Paul Davies September 2006
Born	22 April 1946 (1946-04-22) (age 63) London, UK
Residence	UK Australia USA
Citizenship	British
Nationality	United Kingdom
Ethnicity	English
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Arizona State University University of Cambridge University of Adelaide Macquarie University University of Newcastle
Alma mater	University College London
Doctoral advisor	Michael J. Seaton Sigurd Zienau
Other academic advisors	Fred Hoyle
Doctoral students	Nicholas Birrell Edmund Copeland Kerry Hinton Don Koks Andrew Matacz Carol Oliver William Walker
Known for	Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect Bunch-Davies vacuum state
Notable awards	Kelvin Medal (2001) Faraday Prize (2002) Templeton Prize (1995)
Religious stance	His position is "undecided". His writings are technically agnostic, non-Platonistic, with a leaning towards minimalistic Deism.

Paul Charles William Davies AM (born 22 April 1946) is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, currently a professor at Arizona State University as well as the Director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He has held previous academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, University of London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He has proposed that a one-way trip to Mars could be a viable option.

In 2005, he took up the chair of the SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Education

In 1970, he completed his PhD entitled Contributions to Theoretical Physics: (i) Radiation Damping in the Optical Continuum (ii) A Quantum Theory of Wheeler-Feynman Electrodynamics under Michael J. Seaton and Sigurd Zienau at University College London. He then was a postdoc under Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge.

Scientific research

Davies's inquiries have included theoretical physics, cosmology, and astrobiology; his research has been mainly in the area of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Notable contributions are the so-called Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect, according to which an observer accelerating through empty space will perceive a bath of thermal radiation, and the Bunch-Davies vacuum state, often used as the basis for explaining the fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. A paper co-authored with Stephen Fulling and William Unruh was the first to suggest that black holes evaporating via the Hawking effect lose mass as a result of a flux of negative energy streaming into the hole from the surrounding space. Davies has had a longstanding association with the problem of time’s arrow, and was also a forerunner of the theory that life on Earth may have come from Mars cocooned in rocks ejected by asteroid and comet impacts. During his time in Australia he helped establish the Australian Centre for Astrobiology.

Books

He has produced over twenty books, including:

• 1974 The Physics of Time Asymmetry
• 1978 The Runaway Universe ISBN 0-460-04286-6)
• 1979 Stardoom ISBN 0-00-635318-5
• 1980 Other Worlds, ISBN 0-460-04400-1
• 1981 The Edge of Infinity
• 1982 The Accidental Universe ISBN 0-521-28692-1
• 1982 Quantum Fields in Curved Space (with N.D. Birrell)
• 1983 God and the New Physics ISBN 0-14-022550-1
• 1984 Superforce
• 1986 The Ghost in the Atom
• 1987 The Cosmic Blueprint
• 1988 Superstrings: A Theory of Everything ISBN 0-521-35741-1
• 1991 The Matter Myth
• 1992 The Mind of God
• 1994 The Last Three Minutes ISBN 1-85799-336-5
• 1995 Are We Alone? ISBN 0-14-025179-0
• 1995 About Time
• 1998 The Fifth Miracle: : The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• 2002 How to Build a Time Machine ISBN 0-14-100534-3
• 2007 The Goldilocks Enigma, also under the title Cosmic Jackpot
• 2008 Quantum Aspects of Life (Eds. Derek Abbott, Paul C. W. Davies, and Arun K. Pati, with foreword by Sir Roger Penrose)

Essays and papers

"What Happened Before the Big Bang?" in God for the 21st Century, Russell Stannard ed., Templeton Foundation Press, 2000, ISBN 1890151394

Awards

Davies' talent as a communicator of science has been recognized in Australia by an Advance Australia Award and two Eureka Prizes, and in the UK by the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics, and the 2002 Faraday Prize by The Royal Society. Davies received the Templeton Prize in 1995.

Davies was made a member of the Order of Australia in the 2007 Queen's birthday honours list

Media activity

Davies writes and comments on scientific and philosophical issues. He made a documentary series for BBC Radio 3, and two Australian television series, The Big Questions and More Big Questions. His BBC documentary ‘The Cradle of Life’ featured the subject of his Faraday Prize lecture. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines worldwide. He has been guest on numerous radio and television programs including the children podcast program Ask A Biologist.

Davies in popular culture

• He is heavily referenced in the novel Naive, Super by Norwegian writer Erlend Loe (translated by Tor Ketil Solberg), published in 1996.
• He has an Erdős Number of three.^[1]

Criticism

Scientists critical of what they see as Davies' religious agenda include Jerry Coyne, Nathan Myhrvold, Lawrence Krauss, Scott Atran, Sean Carroll, Jeremy Bernstein, PZ Myers, Lee Smolin, John Horgan, Alan Sokal (all ten responding to Davies' article "Taking Science On Faith" at Edge .org's Reality Club), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion chapter 1) and Victor J Stenger (reviewing The Cosmic Blueprint).

See also

• Quantum Aspects of Life

References

1. ^ The AMS collaboration data base (corroborated by Jerry Grossman, 2007, private communication) lists this path: Borosh, I.; Chui, C. K.; Erdos, P. On changes of signs in infinite series. (Russian summary) Anal. Math. 4 (1978), no. 1, 3–12. Fulling, Stephen A.(1-TXAM); Borosh, Itshak(1-TXAM); da Conturbia, Andrea(1-TXAM) Cataloguing general graphs by point and line spectra. (English summary) Comput. Phys. Comm. 115 (1998), no. 2-3, 93–112. Davies, P. C. W.; Fulling, S. A.; Christensen, S. M.; Bunch, T. S. Energy-momentum tensor of a massless scalar quantum field in a Robertson-Walker universe. Ann. Physics 109 (1977), no. 1, 108–142.

Davies videos

On an Ultimate Explanation:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5.
• About Cosmic Jackpot.

External links

• Paul Davies @ Arizona State University
• BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science
• Interview with Paul Davies at Astroseti.Org
• SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup
• Summary of Davies' works and biography
• Davies' maths genealogy
• Davies' celebrity IMDB profile
• Life & Building E.T. - Davies' Podcast Interview on Ask A Biologist
• Taking Science on Faith