The Fifth Miracle - by Paul Davies (Paperback)

About the Book

An award-winning, bestselling author shows how recent and imminent scientific discoveries will transform the understanding of life's origins and raise the fundamental question: Are we alone in the universe? 11 drawings.

Book Synopsis

Are We Alone in the Universe?

In this provocative and far-reaching book, internationally acclaimed physicist and writer Paul Davies confronts one of science's great outstanding mysteries -- the origin of life.

Three and a half billion years ago, Mars resembled earth. It was warm and wet and could have supported primitive organisms. If life once existed on Mars, might it have originated there and traveled to earth inside meteorites blasted into space by cosmic impacts?

Davies builds on recent scientific discoveries and theories to address larger questions of existence: What, exactly, is life? Is it the inevitable by-product of physical laws, as many scientists maintain, or an almost miraculous accident? Are we alone in the universe, or will life emerge on all earthlike planets? And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, is it preordained to evolve toward greater complexity and intelligence?

Through his search for answers to these questions, Davies explores the ultimate mystery of mankind's existence -- who we are and what our place might be in the unfolding drama of the cosmos.

Review Quotes

"Davies makes accessible a subject growing increasingly arcane." -- Leonard Shlain, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Paul Davies has been writing excellent books about science for so long that it is hard to believe that he is still getting better. But on this evidence, he is.... Delightful." -- John Gribbin, author of In Search of SchrÖdinger's Cat