Paul Davies

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For other persons named Paul Davies, see Paul Davies (disambiguation).

Paul C. W. Davies
At the World Science Festival in June 2008
Born	April 22, 1946 (1946-04-22) (age 62) London, UK
Residence	UK Australia USA
Citizenship	Dual British-Australian
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 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 (born 22nd April 1946) is a British-born 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.

1 Education
2 Scientific research
3 Books
4 Essays and papers
5 Awards
6 Criticism
7 Media activity
8 Davies in popular culture
9 See also
10 References
11 Davies videos
12 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Books

He has produced over twenty books, including:

1974 The Physics of Time Asymmetry
1978 The Runaway Universe/Stardoom
1980 Other Worlds
1981 The Edge of Infinity
1982 The Accidental Universe
1982 Quantum Fields in Curved Space (with N.D. Birrell)
1983 God and the New Physics
1984 Superforce
1986 The Ghost in the Atom
1987 The Cosmic Blueprint
1991 The Matter Myth
1992 The Mind of God
1994 The Last Three Minutes
1995 Are We Alone?
1995 About Time
1998 The Fifth Miracle
2001 How to Build a Time Machine
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)

[edit] Essays and papers

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

[edit] 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

He has an Erdős Number of three.^[1]

[edit] Criticism

Davies' sympathy towards religion's reliance on faith has been criticized by the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins:

Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism - for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).^[2]

A number of physicists and scientists from other areas of study have criticized Davies for his New York Times article, "Taking Science on Faith", for equating science too strongly with religion, or for creating that impression for the general public.^[3] Fellow theoretical physicists such as Lee Smolin criticized Davies while agreeing with his basic argument:

Davies point is that if we just accept the laws and initial conditions of the whole universe as just given, with no further explanation, then we are reducing science to faith in the unexplained. He is right about this, but he doesn't emphasize that these questions are avoided in most domains of science - Lee Smolin

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

Quantum Aspects of Life

[edit] References

^ 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. $\rightarrow$ 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. $\rightarrow$ 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.
^ RichardDawkins.net
^ Edge.org

[edit] Davies videos

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME	Davies, Paul C.W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	British-Australian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	22nd April, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH	London, UK
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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