Paul Davies

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Paul Davies bigraphy, stories - British physicist

Paul Davies : biography

22 April 1946 –

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 is also currently affiliated with the at Chapman University in California. He has held previous academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, University College 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. He is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum.

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.

The asteroid 6870 Pauldavies is named after him.

Works

Popular books

  • 1974 The Physics of Time Asymmetry, ISBN 0-520-03247-0
  • 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, ISBN 0-14-023194-3
  • 1982 The Accidental Universe ISBN 0-521-28692-1
  • 1982 Quantum Fields in Curved Space (with N.D. Birrell), ISBN 0-521-27858-9
  • 1983 God and the New Physics ISBN 0-14-022550-1
  • 1984 Superforce, ISBN 0-04-539006-1
  • 1986 The Ghost in the Atom, ISBN 0-521-31316-3
  • 1987 The Cosmic Blueprint, ISBN 0-04-440182-5
  • 1988 Superstrings: A Theory of Everything ISBN 0-521-35741-1
  • 1991 The Matter Myth, ISBN 0-670-83585-4
  • 1992 The Mind of God, ISBN 0-671-71069-9
  • 1994 The Last Three Minutes ISBN 1-85799-336-5
  • 1995 Are We Alone? ISBN 0-14-025179-0
  • 1995 About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, ISBN 0-670-84761-5
  • 1998 The Fifth Miracle: : The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-83799-4
  • 2002 How to Build a Time Machine ISBN 0-14-100534-3
  • 2007 The Goldilocks Enigma, also under the title Cosmic Jackpot, ISBN 0-14-102326-0
  • 2008 Quantum Aspects of Life (Eds. Derek Abbott, Paul C. W. Davies, and Arun K. Pati, with foreword by Sir Roger Penrose), ISBN 1-84816-267-7
  • 2010 The Eerie Silence, ISBN 1-4001-6551-2
  • 2010 Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, ISBN 978-0-521-76225-0

Essays and papers

  • "" in God for the 21st Century, Russell Stannard ed., Templeton Foundation Press, 2000, ISBN 1-890151-39-4

Footnotes

Popular culture

  • The novel Naive, Super, by Norwegian writer Erlend Loe (translated by Tor Ketil Solberg), published in 1996, refers to Davies frequently.
  • He has an Erdős Number of three.
  • Numbers (season 5, episode 12) refers to Paul Davies’ Cosmic Think Tank at Arizona State.
  • Lawrence Leung’s Unbelievable (season 1, episode 3), Leung interviews Paul Davies on Alien abduction, where Paul admits to having experienced sleep paralysis.

Media work

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 programmes including the children podcast programme Ask A Biologist.