Can computers help us read the mind of nature? | Paul Davies

For too long, scientists focused on what we can see. Now they are at last starting to decode life’s softwareThis summer marked the centenary of one of Britain’s most famous and controversial scientists – the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Hoyle’s championing of steady-state cosmology was daring enough, and turned out to be ultimately misguided, but his foray into the origin and nature of life in the 1970s prompted fierce criticism. He argued that the odds of life spontaneously sp