Skip to content

Fifth Miracle The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life

Best in textbook rentals since 2012!

ISBN-10: 068486309X

ISBN-13: 9780684863092

Edition: 2000

Authors: Paul Davies, Paul Davies

List price: $17.00
Blue ribbon 30 day, 100% satisfaction guarantee!
what's this?
Rush Rewards U
Members Receive:
Carrot Coin icon
XP icon
You have reached 400 XP and carrot coins. That is the daily max!

Description:

ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? In his latest far-reaching book,The Fifth Miracle,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 the latest scientific discoveries and theories to address the larger question: What, exactly, is life? Is it the inevitable by-product of physical laws, as many scientists maintain, or an almost…    
Customers also bought

Book details

List price: $17.00
Copyright year: 2000
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 3/16/2000
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 304
Size: 5.50" wide x 8.44" long x 0.80" tall
Weight: 0.616
Language: English

Paul Davies is an internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster. He received degrees in physics from University College, London. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney and has held previous academic appointments at the Universities of Cambridge, London, Newcastle upon Tyne and Adelaide. Most of his research has been in the area of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Davies has also has written many books for the general reader in the fascinating fields of cosmology and physics. He is the author of over twenty-five books, including The Mind of God, Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, The Edge of…    

Preface
The Meaning of Life
Life's mysterious origin
What is life?
The life force and other discredited notions
The tale of the ancient molecule
Microbes and the search for Eden
Against the Tide
The degeneration principle
Where does biological information come from?
The entropy gap: gravity as the fountainhead of order
Out of the Slime
The tree of life
The three domains of life
The earliest rock fossils
Spontaneous generation
Re-creating the primordial soup
Chance and the origin of life
The Message in the Machine
Replicate, replicate!
Making a living
The genetic code
Getting the message
A code within the code?
The Chicken-and-Egg Paradox
RNA first
RNA last
Self-organization: something for nothing?
The Cosmic Connection
The stardust in your eyes
Cosmic chemistry
Genesis from space
Impact
The Sisyphus effect
Superbugs
Some like it hot
Life in the underworld
Ascent from Hades
Let them eat rock
The rest is history
Mars: Red and Dead?
A bad place for a vacation
Flood
The Martian greenhouse
Was there life on Mars?
Is there still life on Mars?
Meteorites from Mars
Traces of life?
Killer plague from the red planet!
Panspermia
Survival in space
Did life come to Earth in a meteorite?
Did Earthlife come from Mars?
Did Earthlife go to Mars?
A Bio-Friendly Universe?
Did life ever begin?
Are the laws of nature rigged in favor of life?
Is it Darwinism all the way down?
A ladder of progress?
Is mind predestined?
Notes
Index