by Diane Boudreau

Growing up in suburban London after World War II, Paul Davies considered his life pretty unexciting. Money was tight. Toys and even books were scarce. School was a dreary affair.

“It was a very dull time. There was no TV. Food was rationed. You might get a week at some freezing seaside resort as a vacation,” he explains.

Excitement, however, comes in many different forms—if you are willing to look in new directions. When Davies was eight, his father took him on a special outing to see a movie at the local cinema. On the walk home, the elder Davies pointed out some of the well-known constellations in the sky. With a tilt of his head, 8-year-old Paul found the playground of his dreams—the universe.

“I realized you just had to look up and there’s a wonderland,” says Davies, now a college professor and director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at ASU. These days, a part of that wonderland—the asteroid (6870) Pauldavies—is even named in his honor.

Compelled by an insatiable hunger for meaning, Davies spent his childhood devising experiments to help him answer fundamental questions about the universe. He sought to understand the workings of the vast cosmos, the tiny atom, and everything in between.

Finding answers required more than a little ingenuity.

“These days you can go to a shop and buy experiment kits for children. But none of that was available when I was a kid. You just scavenged,” he says. He took anything he could find: old flashlights, scratched lenses, wires and light bulbs and metal tubes. The commonest objects—trash to most people—became vehicles for making sense of the laws that govern our existence.

For his 12th birthday, Davies’ parents bought him a photo developing kit. He didn’t have a camera, but he borrowed his father’s Box Brownie and got free outdated film from the local chemist.

At 14, Davies took it upon himself to build a telescope. He purchased a mirror for the project but put the rest together with scavenged odds and ends.

“I got a bit more ambitious a couple years later and ground my own eight-inch mirror. I did it in the kitchen—my mother nearly had a fit,” he says.

No one stopped Davies from conducting his experiments, but many of the adults in his life found his curiosity befuddling.

“My mother said, ‘He’d always argue just to make a point.’ My teachers would say, ‘Here’s the inevitable question from Davies,’” he recalls. His father was skeptical that one could earn a living by asking big questions. But that is precisely what Davies does today.

He has traded in his kitchen table laboratory for an office on ASU’s Tempe Campus. As director of the BEYOND Center, Davies is charged with the job of asking and exploring the fundamental questions of our existence. Are we alone in the universe? Is there more than one universe? Is time travel possible?

Davies arrived at ASU in September 2006, charged primarily with the task of creating the new center. To fulfill the center’s mission, Davies works with researchers from a broad range of disciplines. He plays matchmaker, creating collaborations to answer questions that go beyond traditional subject categories. The center also hosts workshops and guest lectures to inspire new ideas and encourage discussion. In December 2006, for example, the BEYOND Center hosted its first workshop on the topic of alternate forms of life on Earth.

“The great hope in astrobiology is that the universe will be teeming with life,” explains Davies. “The act of faith that underlies this is that life forms readily under a wide range of conditions. But we don’t know this. The origin of life could be a stupendous chemical fluke, unique to our planet. If life really does arise easily, it should have done so many times over on Earth. Might there be organisms right under our noses that descended from other genesis events?”

At first, it sounds implausible. After all, if there were other critters out there that descended from a different point of origin, wouldn’t someone have noticed them? Not necessarily. First of all, says Davies, they could be limited to microbes, just like the roots of our own family tree. So they would not be obvious to the casual observer. And even though we have tools for detecting and studying microorganisms, they might not respond to alternative forms of life.

“Microbiologists have developed all kinds of techniques to study life as we know it, but not life as we don’t know it. If alternative life used different amino acids, for instance, we wouldn’t identify it on a cursory inspection,” he says.

At the December workshop, Davies and about 20 other scientists came up with ideas about what to look for when seeking out alternative life forms. Several new research programs are now flowing from these ideas. Since then, the center has hosted additional workshops on life as an emergent phenomenon, complex adaptive systems (from ant colonies to mountain building), and bizarre paradoxes in quantum mechanics.

This kind of large-scale conceptualizing is nothing new to Davies, who has never shied away from questions that many would say can’t be answered. Ever since he was piecing together scrap materials in his bedroom, Davies has possessed a boundless curiosity about how the universe works, and why. As a teenager he looked to organized religion to help him grapple with his existential questions. But the church’s answers struck him as either too shallow or else utterly incomprehensible. Instead, he turned to physics and mathematics—the language of the universe—to help him make sense of the world.

“I’m a physicist and always have been. I was born a physicist. It has always been the deep theoretical ideas that attracted me. The very large and the very small, and anything that mixes the two,” he says.

He studied physics at University College in London, earning his doctorate in 1970. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, he worked alongside Stephen Hawking and Martin (now Lord) Rees.

“In those days these people were just the lads in the corridor,” he says. “I was not aware that history was in the making at the time.”

In fact, much of Davies’ early research was related to Hawking’s famous 1975 prediction that black holes emit radiation. Known as the “Hawking effect,” this theory changed the way we view gravitation, thermodynamics, and quantum physics.

Classically, black holes have been considered to have such immense gravitational pull that nothing—not even light—can escape. But Hawking suggested that black holes aren’t completely black—they glow with radiation. As they emit radiation, they lose mass, and those that lose more mass than they gain can actually evaporate away.

Davies and his colleagues Steven Fulling and Bill Unruh demonstrated that black holes shrink not because energy flows out, but because negative energy flows in. A byproduct of this research was the conclusion that totally dark, empty space should appear to a rapidly accelerating observer to glow with heat radiation. This phenomenon is now known as the Davies-Unruh effect.

In 1977, Davies made another black hole discovery. Unlike regular bodies, most black holes get hotter as they radiate heat. However, rapidly spinning or highly charged black holes do the opposite. This distinction turned out to have important ramifications for the thermodynamic properties and stability of black holes.

In the late 1970s, Davies and graduate student Tim Bunch explored the behavior of quantum fields in certain model universes. One of the models they examined is known as “de Sitter space.” Davies and Bunch developed a theory of quantum vacuum states in de Sitter space, one of which is known as the “Bunch-Davies vacuum.”

“We did it because it was one of the few things that could be solved quickly without a computer, and Tim needed his Ph.D.,” Davies says with a smile. “We learned a few years later we’d made a lucky guess.”

De Sitter space took on central importance in the inflationary-universe scenario. The idea, proposed by Alan Guth in 1981, provided plausible solutions to key questions left unanswered in earlier descriptions of the Big Bang. In short, the theory of inflation states that the universe expanded at a frenetic rate in the first fleeting instant (10-35 seconds) after the Big Bang. In those early moments, the universe resembled de Sitter space. Guth’s theory formed the basis for what is now the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of the universe, and physicists regularly use the Bunch-Davies vacuum in their calculations.

Davies also became fascinated early on with time asymmetry, or what he calls “the arrow of time.”

“There is a paradox in physics. The laws of physics are symmetric in time—there is no distinction between past and future. But the world clearly does distinguish. How do we live in a world that has time directionality when basic physics doesn’t?”

This line of questioning led to Davies’ first book, The Physics of Time Asymmetry. In it he sorted out some of the problems and misconceptions about the subject that had been plaguing scientists for decades. The arrow of time also shot him in a new career direction, as a popular science writer.

The Physics of Time Asymmetry was not intended for the general public; it was written for physicists. After it was published, Cambridge University Press asked Davies to write an undergraduate-level book on a related topic. Its success drew the attention of popular science publishers, who began courting him.

“That was the beginning. It just grew and grew,” says Davies, who had never intended to add “writer” to his job description.

In his writing and in his speech, Davies has a knack for putting what may be the most esoteric subject in existence into everyday language. In effect, he is a translator, turning what you might call his native tongue—mathematics—into English.

“The biggest problem in writing about theoretical physics is that you can’t use mathematics. You have to use metaphors and analogies,” he says.

This problem has not stopped him from writing more than 20 books for general audiences, including: How to Build a Time Machine; About Time; Are We Alone? The Philosophical Basis of the Search for Extraterrestrial Life and The Mind of God. His most recent book, Cosmic Jackpot, was published in April 2007. In it, he explains how conditions in our universe are weirdly suited for producing life, and also explores why this might be so.

In addition to his books, Davies is a prolific author of scientific articles, popular articles, and essays. Not bad for a guy who hated writing back in school. Now, however, he tackles his writing projects with as much energy and zeal as his research.

“He’s incredibly driven. He works harder than anyone I’ve come across. He gets up at five in the morning, gets to work as early as possible, and gets home late at night,” says Pauline Davies, an award-winning science broadcaster who is also Paul’s wife.

The two have collaborated on projects for the BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company). For example, Pauline produced and Paul presented a joint BBC/ABC documentary about the telegraph wire that stretched from Adelaide to London. Pauline received a New York Festivals award for the project.

“Together we’re very interested in science. We talk about it constantly. There’s a lot of professional overlap,” says Pauline.

Paul Davies has presented multiple radio and television shows for the BBC and for TV stations in Australia. His television series, “The Big Questions,” filmed in the Australian outback, has been repeated several times. Davies moved to Australia in 1990 to teach mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide. In 2001, he transferred to Macquarie University in Sydney to help set up the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA).

“I am a physicist but astrobiology was a sort of hobby that I took seriously enough for them to ask me to help,” he says.

Davies has long been interested in how (and where) life began, whether life exists on other planets, and why the universe is just right for life. In the early 1990s, Davies proposed that life might have started on Mars and spread to Earth inside rocks that were ejected from the Red Planet by comet impacts. At the time, the scientific community pooh-poohed the idea. Now, however, it is widely accepted as a possibility.

It was through astrobiology that Davies made first contact with ASU. The ACA’s main collaborating institution is ASU, so Davies became familiar with ASU astrobiologists like Jack Farmer. Here at ASU, Davies continues to work on astrobiology—including teaching an honors class on life in the universe—while also pursuing his many other research interests.

“Just doing astrobiology I felt a little restricted because my background goes beyond that,” he says. “What attracted me to ASU was Michael Crow’s vision of a university where traditional boundaries are less important. A lot of universities pay lip service to this but few actually practice it. Here is one of the few places I can talk to folks in other departments and collaborate with them.”

His current research questions are mind-bogglingly broad. For instance, he is developing ways to test the hypothesis that the universe we observe is just one of many, each with different natural laws. And he is grappling with the question of why the laws of physics are mathematical. As he writes on his Web site, “Mathematics is, after all, a product of the human intellect, so its extreme success in describing realms such as subatomic particles or cosmology is a mystery.”

He also continues his earlier investigations into phenomena such as black holes and the directional nature of time.

“Paul Davies is one of the worlds’ most exciting thinkers,” says ASU President Michael Crow. “He pushes the known boundaries of the universe with his inquiries, exploring profound questions about science. His ability to integrate all of the sciences, to find surprising links between different branches of science, is what will facilitate this new research institute at ASU. Under Paul Davies’ leadership, our new institute will meet head-on some of the most fundamental questions of our times.”

For Davies, it’s just another day on the cosmic playground.

The BEYOND Center has received funding from the Foundational Questions in Science Institute, Richard Procunier, and Robert Kuhn. For more information, visit http://beyond.asu.edu/ or contact Paul Davies, 480.965.3240. Send email to: paul.davies@asu.edu