The Demon in the Machine

How does life create order from chaos? And just what is life, anyway? Leading physicist Paul Davies argues that to find the answers, we must first answer a deeper question: 'What is information?' To understand the origins and nature of life, Davies proposes a radical vision of biology which sees the underpinnings of life as similar to circuits and electronics, arguing that life as we know it should really be considered a phenomenon of information storage. In an extraordinary deep dive into the real mechanics of what we take for granted, Davies reveals how biological processes, from photosynthesis to birds' navigation abilities, rely on quantum mechanics, and explores whether quantum physics could prove to be the secret key of all life on Earth. Lively and accessible, Demons in the Machine boils down intricate interdisciplinary developments to take readers on an eye-opening journey towards the ultimate goal of science: unifying all theories of the living and the non-living, so that humanity can at last understand its place in the universe.

• Origins
• From Matter to Life: Information and Causality
• Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe
• Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome
• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
• Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta (The MIT Press)
• Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
• The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter
• What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Canto Classics)
• Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum