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's podcast programme Ask A Biologist .
A 2007 opinion piece "Taking Science on Faith" in The New York Times , [13] generated controversy over its exploration of the role of faith in scientific inquiry. Davies argued that the faith scientists have in the immutability of physical laws has origins in Christian theology, and that the claim that science is "free of faith" is "manifestly bogus." [13] The Edge Foundation presented a criticism of Davies' article written by Jerry Coyne, Nathan Myhrvold, Lawrence Krauss, Scott Atran, Sean Carroll, Jeremy Bernstein, PZ Myers, Lee Smolin, John Horgan, Alan Sokal and a response by Davies beginning "I was dismayed at how many of my detractors completely misunderstood what I had written. Indeed, their responses bore the hallmarks of a superficial knee-jerk reaction to the sight of the words 'science' and 'faith' juxtaposed." [14] While atheists Richard Dawkins [15] and Victor J. Stenger [16] have criticised Davies' public stance on science and religion, other commentators, including the John Templeton Foundation, [17] have praised his work. [18] [19]
Davies wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal describing the background to the December 2010 arsenic bacteria press conference and stating that he supported the finding of Felisa Wolfe-Simon that arsenic can replace phosphorus because "I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels." [20] He also made the statement, "Well, I would be astonished if this was the only arsenic-based organism on Earth and Felisa just happened to scrape it up from the bottom of Mono Lake on the first try, It's quite clear that it is the tip of an iceberg. I think it's a window into a whole new world of microbiology. And as a matter of fact, she already has 20 or so candidate other organisms that we're very anxious to take a look at. I think we're going to see a whole new domain of life here." [21] It was later independently demonstrated that the organism's DNA contained no arsenic at all. [22] [23] [24] [25] Concerns have been raised about his responsibility as one of Wolfe-Simon's co-authors. [26]
Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and the atomic number 33. It is a metalloid and one of the pnictogens, and therefore shares many properties with its group 15 neighbors phosphorus and antimony. Arsenic is a notoriously toxic heavy metal. It occurs naturally in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. It has various allotropes, but only the grey form, which has a metallic appearance, is important to industry.
The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. It was first proposed as a physical theory in 1931 by Roman Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître when he suggested the universe emerged from a "primeval atom". Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form. These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The uniformity of the universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments.
Hypothetical types of biochemistry are forms of biochemistry agreed to be scientifically viable but not proven to exist at this time. The kinds of living organisms currently known on Earth all use carbon compounds for basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent, and DNA or RNA to define and control their form. If life exists on other planets or moons it may be chemically similar, though it is also possible that there are organisms with quite different chemistries – for instance, involving other classes of carbon compounds, compounds of another element, or another solvent in place of water.
A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.
Sir Roger Penrose, is a British mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
John David Barrow was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician. He served as Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2008 to 2011. Barrow was also a writer of popular science and an amateur playwright.
George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon. FRSSAf, is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992 he served as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is an A-rated researcher with the NRF.
Simon Conway Morris is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life. Conway Morris's own book on the subject, The Crucible of Creation (1998), however, is critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.
Bernard d'Espagnat was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality. Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.
Michał Kazimierz Heller is a Polish philosopher, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, theologian, and Roman Catholic priest. He is a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków, Poland, and an adjunct member of the Vatican Observatory staff.
Max Jammer, was an Israeli physicist and philosopher of physics. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He was Rector and Acting President at Bar-Ilan University from 1967 to 1977.
Walter Eduard Thirring was an Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named. He was the son of the physicist Hans Thirring.
The Trotter Prize is awarded at Texas A&M University and is part of an endowed lecture series. It is awarded "for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the role of information, complexity and inference in illuminating the mechanisms and wonder of nature" and includes The Trotter Lecture which "seeks to reveal connections between science and religion, often viewed in academia as non-overlapping, if not rival, worldviews.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon is an American microbial geobiologist and biogeochemist. In 2010, Wolfe-Simon led a team that discovered GFAJ-1, an extremophile bacterium that they claimed was capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus to sustain its growth, thus advancing the remarkable possibility of non-RNA/DNA-based genetics. However, these conclusions were immediately debated and criticized in correspondence to the original journal of publication, and were widely disbelieved by scientists. In 2012, two reports refuting the most significant aspects of the original results were published in the same journal in which the original findings had been previously published.
GFAJ-1 is a strain of rod-shaped bacteria in the family Halomonadaceae. It is an extremophile that was isolated from the hypersaline and alkaline Mono Lake in eastern California by geobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA research fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey. In a 2010 Science journal publication, the authors claimed that the microbe, when starved of phosphorus, is capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus to sustain its growth. Immediately after publication, other microbiologists and biochemists expressed doubt about this claim, which was robustly criticized in the scientific community. Subsequent independent studies published in 2012 found no detectable arsenate in the DNA of GFAJ-1, refuted the claim, and demonstrated that GFAJ-1 is simply an arsenate-resistant, phosphate-dependent organism.
Jeffrey Bub is a physicist and philosopher of physics, and Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy, the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Viatcheslav Fyodorovich Mukhanov is a Soviet/Russian born German theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is best known for the theory of Quantum Origin of the Universe Structure. Working in 1980-1981 with Gennady Chibisov in the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow he predicted the spectrum of inhomogeneities in the Universe, which are originated from the initial quantum fluctuations. The numerous experiments in which there were measured the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation are in excellent agreement with this theoretical prediction, thus confirming that the galaxies and their clusters originated from the initial quantum fluctuations. Later on Mukhanov proved that the results he obtained with G. Chibisov in 1981 are of the generic origin and he has developed the general consistent quantum cosmological perturbation theory.
Julia A. Vorholt is a full professor of microbiology at ETH Zurich and an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Rosemary Jeanne Redfield is a microbiologist associated with the University of British Columbia where she worked as a faculty member in the Department of Zoology from 1993 until retiring in 2021.
