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427b969
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Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and..
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science
fred-hoyle
serendipity
coincidence
fine-tuning
id
intelligent-design
theism
chance
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Paul Davies |
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2f5228c
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When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours ..
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Paul Davies |
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7e093c0
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Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is..
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time
reality
now
time-passing
physics
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Paul Davies |
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3bd0efd
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Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.
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evolution
science
chemical-evolution
origin-of-information
origin-of-life
biology
id
intelligent-design
darwinism
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Paul Davies |
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0ac11a2
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Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a spot moving..
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time
reality
phi-phenomenon
now
time-passing
psychology
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Paul Davies |
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1a7ab8b
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Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have proba..
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time
now
time-passing
physics
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Paul Davies |
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e2fc005
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The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this i..
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evolution
nature
science
life
molecules
complexity
cells
materialism
naturalism
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Paul Davies |
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e632026
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A really big question is why the universe is fit for life; it looks like it has been 'fixed up'.
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Paul Davies |
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c5a1fc0
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is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can..
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time
reality
scientific-method
spacetime
time-passing
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Paul Davies |
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5e867c6
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The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown.
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Paul Davies |
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3a14547
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The thing that separates life from non-life is information.
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Paul Davies |