well welcome to soviet visionaries made. the best efforts of scientists this fundamental question a still a conundrum like yesterday has his own formula for tracing the answer joined by professor paul davies is a system astrobiology cosmologist and bestselling author. professor paul davis. astrobiologists cosmology bestselling author really great to have you with us today. so i should talk about special information because i'm a journalist and i work with information a lot now you're interested in this concept of organized information for me as

a journalist information is more obstructive a concept than mathematicians think of it as like bits and binary code and stuff without making it to complicate formality and says can you explain what is information in physics. right say you're correct that we use that data nice but we have a sort of rough and ready idea of what information means and the best definition is that it reduces on certainty so for example 'd if you were going to carry moscow sort of mantra and you just go random you know my point i don't know 10 minutes or something her trends come along but if you have a timetable it reduces your onset when they frame arrived back that initial one should be can make very mathematically precise about 70 years ago and what we know according to mission period was based on that notion of reduction in and said

. can you not a simple example you toss a coin if you count that heads or tails i don't know if you use that expression in russia one side on the other and you don't know but when you look you you get the definite it with you quote one bits of information so that's a technical definition and so using that we can apply some biology to the nature of life and it was recognized a long time ago where the famous double helix of the structure of d.n.a. was worked out and that d.n.a. storms the genetic information it's a blueprint if you like of what makes you you meet me and that information has to the store have processed them right down to manage them manipulate it and so we will reckon hons out of what makes living systems so important this so they can us all more express the nation one generation next while they express it in the

making proteins or carry hence a puncture wounds so that's the basic idea about how warm i came to exist that's still a very big it's own way so trading information as if it. no matter was the stuff out of which the world is builds is one of the avenues in south that you're pursuing great so what do you get as a scientist when you trade information this way what kind of new understanding about the universe can you find if you accept hypothetically that information is the primal building block of our world. and you've raised a very interesting issue but wait understand but as a practical matter information is critical to the operation of biological systems. there's a whole show go by over into magic so now known her about gene entity we can treat

the d.n.a. as like a book of life and you can get in there and culturally edit it and change some of the letters to some of the meaning you can create your own platform so this is current technology so we all understand that but you asked a deeper question about whether somehow information is the primary stuff of which the universe is built and the american justices john wheeler he coined the term black hole he was a great advocate of this idea that at the bottom what we might call the great chain of being is information matter we think about sums or electrons or something we normally think they are the primary stuff but he said no no information is the primary stuff matter is simply a manifestation of various states of information and so yeah wonderful to have it. it's a body that's some of the bits is the bit of information he felt information is

a primary source now that's still a minority view. a number of my colleagues feel that yes the universe is really a vast information processing of of that is the ultimate reality of the this thing we call matter you can you can you can change it you can touch it it shapes call it . it down it's all about information so regarding that question of matter there's an equation of yours that i came across life because matter class information so that means that means information equals life minus matter right can i. get information b interpret it as so all of this include equation. a saudi has one child is a lady of course when it comes from a religious you. most scientists talk about some as

a separate thing and some you think their plates around alongside mine but if by that by the word so i've brought is say the mind rethink how does the brain work out of it have consciousness so we've got this sort of rather abstract chain who have a mind and we have. consciousness and. we don't think of it as a substance of his i don't but somehow there's a matter of story to tell we have a brain rev sound it's in the frame of electrons signals got rid of the brain and then we've got this extraordinary from of a cold consciousness of material them have to be fitted together now i don't think we've done that yet but. i suppose your question is leading me in that direction to say well if you can from a ship is prime or if. maybe we should think of mind as being primary matter as

being 2nd rate i'm counting this a little bit but that idea goes by to drench of history as crude idealism that their respective ancient greek philosophy of the ultimately well it is you know tells of sort of as it were a modern stuff of a mass of stuff that's a big stretch for a book physicist. but unlike many things i mentioned the idea is often a grain of truth and i think we can back to some of that engine thinking but yeah but i still want to lay ponder on that a lot of the because when you talk howet works in your 'd recent book in cells in atoms how can information be on a same level as matter i mean doesn't informationally exist when there is something or someone to read it is an information basically confined to the eye of the beholder. yes so you're absolutely right it's a lot of trauma so this whole fascinating air of information theory 'd 'd in just 6

rounds land. he famously said information is physical what he meant by that is it in 2000 solar fly free. in the it's always time to matter so if for example i mentioned d.n.a. a position of new kids hides d.n.a. information in about a logical organism in a computer it will be you know ones and zeros stored. on the hard drive or something like that is always a physical media. the same is true energy we talk about energy in an abstract sense as more it a mass of energy can be competitive from one form or the other of astarte and 3 different systems of energy itself doesn't go away make it spread out a bit but it's always somewhere in a physical system but here in a sense it has a life of its own informations a bit like that we can talk about it as if it hasn't and that exists some we do all

the time. we. simply have not and the united states. billions and billions of dollars by. selling and manipulating information and said you know it must have in some sense be real but it's always going to be instantiated in matter somehow somewhere about doesn't mean that it can still be a crime rate comes. so information of matter go hand in hand no doubt about it where assuming that information is the primal thing grade or at least as primal as the matter assuming that information is the foundation of the universe isn't it kind of like saying that nap of a town is the town. yes friend as they map their childhood territory if it's a one time on math mathematicians will tell you then then the map is the territory . and then i think once what we're discussing here

a may be hung up on this this point. in some little bit like a b. dichotomy a train hardware and software in computing. we will understand the computer will only. it's loaded with the appropriate software. draw the analogy here with lush life seems to me like magic but so does this computer i'm talking to you on this computer i think looks like it's much account as. well as your mentor computer science department and. knew when she went in and they pulled the bank off from they said well if you know it can get silicone here and those bits of copper or. some other unsuppressed data will completely show how now it all goes together but we're beginning to understand well you know that that was wrong that you have to go to computing to problems and they'll tell you all about the software about

the that's been written into the machine that's all you need but the software account around. with their computer is more than the house. and same document does the software have independent existence well shown in a sense it's because i can pop it i can put it on a member of and send it back to. it's still have it's a psychopath. so like in apartments exist in nature but they were his existence up there instantiated in some. things and so i think that's really what we're dealing with right comes from biology we have to go beyond just saying well there's a path because we have that information has a more active all supervisory role in the big change and just think development of the embryo it's not just a matter of information being read out everything has to be. a

choreographer it has to be great so let's talk about. unfolding. developments of the embryo so this monster is just counting bits and i don't think we understand that more and there are roles that operate in giving rats. involving information that we only just we haven't completely wiped them out as new physics in even reza i believe. so did average fruiting who started thinking about this way back in the one people it's called then take a sharp break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to professor paul davis physicist astrobiologist cosmologist and bestselling author talking about is life made out of information stay with us.

thanks guys it's financial survival. when customers go by you do something. else well reduces love. that's undercutting what's good for food markets back into the global economy. more simple spiros mean choice of those lists nissho to show just what that also has been. but so far we're short in the months to draw. the medium that you will quickly in the us move too quickly easing months alone with. a profit in the last year and there's a write up of course on what the what all of the most of them there. do it in you

must at those later. mossop and they will still put you on your thumb for a sham doing what all the money. is like i bet on we. will get that in this. summer within that we know more than the board it's. the wish to extremely bad in understanding other cultures and other kinds of society. precisely because it believed every word should be motoring you know in a west direction. so he doesn't really feel the need to understand other cultures i think that just he's one of the great problems the west faces now is that he just doesn't understand china and i you know you can't make sense of china will cause you can't make sense of journey if you don't have a ball and really study. now

we're back with professor paul davis physicist astrobiologist and bestselling author paul how is information connected to light in your eyes i mean i heard you say that living beings are information processing systems this could sound simple but if we can for a moment accept that is this what we're for to process information kind of like well we make computers for. well that's that some cynics will say. yes. the your body is just a vehicle of mapping we want

a lot of information and we're not a lot of the nation. that by my reckoning at it will stop from having to think about the nature of information in biology say we've discussed already in the example everybody knows which is the information in d.n.a. which is copied. to the next generation it's expressed in the development of the embryo in a very complicated brain but it doesn't stop there because in a cell. we all know we have genes and these genes can be switched on or off but they don't act in isolation they form complex. information sloan's around these combated people doing. biologists figure out more genes for each other's allman they draw on these network diagrams wiring diagrams it can computation and so there's a lot of information processing in those now and then cell signal each of their

signalling molecules. same information combines the other as this great information present system out here between areas. everybody knows about that and it doesn't stop it comes right on through each house systems why don't we scale. and i think we're all these days obsessed by power since a case in point. the chain i embarrass is a central part of the planetary system the planter trico system they viruses get everywhere out there like my body could antigovernment so little bits of information that a pasta around and are essential over the health of the planet. and so i have to say. a rat's. time entry ecosystem of life is the original wildlife web it's a wave of information. extents of planetary scale so it's every parent's life but

we understand only the bottom level of this nation i'm sure there are no i don't think these are miracles of a belief in anything like that but i think we don't yet pretty have that as its worked out of that's the next great how many young people i hope we do. watching us and i noticed into this conversation that i would say i was going to make a career in science again be at that intersection of physics and chemistry and information theory and biology and computing that's where the big discoveries will be made in the coming decades. so in one interview you described life as a complexity that cannot be achieved through fixed rules and there's a famous quote by and saying god doesn't play dies meaning that there's got to be underlying laws for what seems random at the moment are you actually saying that god indeed plays out as if the rules of nature are not fixed but flexible. or using

instant language i am in the same gold dust played i say he was very much of a minority at the time and experiments in foundations of quantum mechanics of the last few decades are pretty last night down that nature is intrinsically unsound or indeterministic so what einstein meant by god does not play dies his he recognized it's common to have all things were sort of pretty rad to him chancey but he told the beneath that was a hit of deterministic order where everything that happened happened for a very particular reason but in principle you could predict exactly 'd what amounts would do if you had that level of detail which we now know that that is not correct experiments of refuting that so there is something intrinsically. indeterministic or chomsky or open if you like and our views about systems of it's all

become alike killer level sort of quantum physics introduces absolute they have quantum physics is essential to understanding. but how these things fit together how the. quantum mechanics might chip together with 'd the information processing olivia who has a skin care of some ohio level we don't doubt but this is an area. of the month. and so somewhere in that mix is the secret of mine but i come back to mt trying to found lots of quantum mechanics. who in 140 s. reagan. gave his friends lectures the time to watch his life for the wrote a book about how bad he recognized the cause may have exposed the central from the standing the stability of the information content of cells but he will say less they have the idea but there may be

a new kind of physical mo operating in living matter he didn't say watson who was definite about it but he was for that idea i think it was right that if there is a new the physical law 'd operates in the living mess it doesn't contradict the underlying rules that's for sure. transcendence. in addition to the conceiving systems that exist as you heard but what are your biggest inventions as far as i understand is to find x. or trace your life and you say one of the reasons why we still haven't found it is because we don't really know how life on earth 1st started how does knowing how life when are started going to affect our research on alien life. well but i'm so serious that was a long time ago a lot of. i was a passionate belief in life and death and everybody told i was crazy looking crazy hands people setting might as well look for sharon's it's obvious that life is some

complex now that we can surely have half a dozen buns the idea being that there was some sort of amazing chain of chemical reactions leading to this very extraordinary improbable thing we call life on have a journey manchuria the pendulum has swung the other way and now many many scientists say. you know this is teeming with life where if you have asked like planets as you can chance life whatever other truth is we absolutely don't know because the big step is how do you go from non-life to life isn't something that is going to happen. easily in advance of me wait a few minutes how come or is it the case that it's like a freak. sequence of chemical reactions which prints again are extremely improbable a manhattanite he wants in the universe and we don't know how to answer that because nobody has made life. a long way from understanding how

a chemistry tense to life how did molecules organize ourselves into something even a primitive in the gulf is huge. mishmash of chemicals and even the simplest of ripping so i mean i know we don't know what numbers are pretty and simply don't know that number we can't estimate how many it happens you can it's we know that in the milky way galaxy there are. probably over s. like planets on which life as we know it could be met at least if we took it there you could survive so we know there are plenty of candidates. the chances that. on those planets chemical reactions were 10 to life it could be that such probable friends such a basic. unlikely step that a branch of happen anywhere else in the galaxy or company but if i'm right about

these gene principles. praising and living matter there are a lot of life. in living matzoh if we knew there was also but remember episode oh yes those rules were no parade the time chemistry and a life with. probability. then we can put a number to it and the mom we don't have those roles and we have married and swore they were life beyond their so this is complete speculation no beliefs my belief. so if we connect life to information in a meaningful way does that mean that allien life could just be some form of information that is not related to having cells or certain chemical adamant like it could be as douglas adams suggested a particular shade of blue for instance. gerri. that's a very very good question that it goes to the house what we're trying to achieve in our research. university because. everybody knows this is fair

astrobiology it means you know going to look for lashed the on death but of course you have to the what to look for. and where you know you. want to rest or a life is like but what we were not ready is to have some sort of more general definition of what is life and that definition in my view is based on software and hardware. stuff which a little hole has and is made into some way that it information is organized and presses so if it's the case of back lash if we can to try my life as a particular type of informational organization it's organize information not as any oh 'd it's a very specific definition as eyes of the way. my money we look for all night informational software signature issue i can stay out of the

house president johnson some concentrate on those they sold out i don't have the right sort of molecules we repeat more thinking about does it have a right conditions sold out and nation prices in to take place in and the man other represents life this is all wishful thinking at the moment we don't have a fully worked out their finish of life which is independent of the stuff of which is made. of the end of the day don't that's what it will be about life beyond earth or the existing. replica of our life. but there were some common principles of those principles i think. software over hardware just by now you have different makes of computers and. their own. well you know i read so later champ's old you might have also like plastic you. are all made of stuff but one. individual computer said stinky breath is the software amount so for just like the

hardware has didn't principle. so basic ideas of coding circles the same mr a book. paul paul it was such a pleasure talking to you as a true delight and i hope we get to do this again because the subject is and less and there are so many unanswered questions still thanks a lot for this chat and good luck with everything stay safe thank you but i really enjoy talking here i reach out so ok thank you absolutely wrong.

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