What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

by Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose (Foreword)

What Is Life? is a 1944 non-fiction science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943 at Trinity College, Dublin. Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?" In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule and would give both Francis Crick and James Watson initial inspiration in their research.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biology, Physics, Popular Science, Evolution

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Erwin Schrodinger or Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: he formulated the wave equation (stationary and time-dependent Schrödinger equation) and revealed the identity of his development of the formalism and matrix mechanics. Schrödinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function.

He won the 1933 Nobel prize in physics with colleague Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory"

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am convinced that theoretical physicists are the true mystics of our age. Being, on the whole, smart people, they have developed some useful tricks to reduce the occupational hazards of their calling; the most dangerous of these hazards is the ever-present possibility of being killed by an angry mob who object to having their normal view of the world unexpectedly turned upside-down. Mystics have always been in the habit of evading their pursuers by using language which is difficult for the uninitiated to understand, but modern physicists have taken the idea to a new level. The strategy has proven very successful, and it's become quite rare to see a physicist burned at the stake or forced to drink hemlock.

Every now and then, however, a physicist gets a little careless. In this famous essay, Schrödinger only puts in a hundred-odd pages of cover, with hardly any equations at all, before coming out with the following passage:

Let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.

(ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' - am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: 'Hence I am God Almighty' sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition

ATHMAN = BRAHMAN

upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase:

DEUS FACTUS SUM

(I have become God). To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one - not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, in which respect they very much resemble the mystic.

[DJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading explanations of biology from physicists; what once were magic and collections of 'just-so' stories become explanations of how and why processes occur the way they do. This book was single-handedly responsible for convincing dozens of physicists to chase issues biological and given I already had the bug, I figured it would be interesting to see what sparked it in so many others.

Here's the conversation that runs through my brain when I think about this book:

The Children: Grandpa Schroedinger, Grandpa Schroedinger! Tell us about biology!

Grandpa Schroedinger: Well, what do you want to know?

TC: What's an organism?

GS: An organism is a 4D pattern that consumes negative entropy to maintain order.

TC: Huh?

GS: It's something that's alive.

TC: Oh. Why are organisms so much bigger than atoms?

GS: Ho, ho, ho! If organisms were close to the size of atoms, life would be intolerable! We'd all be buffeted about by the quantum chaos and never have a chance at predicting our environment. Think about it: your sensory organs would be useless if all they could pick up was Brownian motion. That's one hell of a signal-to-noise problem! We have to be big so that life is more predictable.

TC: How come we don't know how life works? If physicists are so smart, why haven't they figured out the genetic code yet?

GS (grave face): You should learn not to run your mouth. But if you must ask, it's because physicists like things that are easy to study, such as the relatively simple and elegant structures produced by statistical mechanics. But statistical mechanics produces statistical structures - periodic crystals and such. Organic molecules are aperiodic and quite foreign to physicists. We shouldn't expect that our physical models will carry over so easily; in fact, 'it is well-nigh unthinkable that the laws and regularities thus discovered should happen to apply immediately to the behaviour of systems which do not exhibit the structure on which those laws and regularities were based.' Reductionism is hard. There are many steps on the ladder between physics and phenomena, each one possibly best describable in a completely different language.

TC: I heard the biologists are going to discover DNA in 7 years, but I want to know now! How does it work?!

GS: Well fortunately I'm a flippin' genius and probably one of the smartest grandpas in the world so I can tell you how this DNA stuff works seven years before anyone else will know. Here's the trick: it's an aperiodic crystal stored in your chromosomes.

TC: But if it's so tiny, how do we fit the recipe for a whole human being in there?

GS (pats child on head): Combinatorics, my boy! Combinatorics! If you have 25 letters and want to make a 25-letter word using just 5 different letters, you know how many words you can make? More than 62 trillion!

TC: Wow... but if the DNA is so tiny, how does it remain stable? You told us that tiny things get buffeted about in the quantum storm!

GS: Silly child! Quantum theory can save the day again! Since molecules are only stable in discrete quantum states, these aperiodic crystals will only be stable in certain patterns. They'll need a minimum amount of energy to pop out of place, kind of like a marble stuck in a thimble. You can poke it and flick it without knocking the marble out but if you smack it too hard, kapoot! That's why high temperatures and x-ray radiation are not particularly conducive to your health. They sometimes provide enough energy so that, kapoot!, your little aperiodic DNA crystals pop out of place and mutate!

TC: Wait.. I look nothing like my mom and dad. How can I be just a copy of them?

GS: Well, it turns out your DNA isn't perfectly stable. It's just instable enough that mutations can occur here and there. Think of it like an optimization problem: your DNA mutates just often enough to explore different design possibilities, but just rare enough that evolution can isolate the mutation responsible when we make a good or bad move. With too many changes at once, it's impossible to judge which were 'good' and which were 'bad', but with no changes at all, the whole world would be like one big personality-less fraternity. Either that or your parents adopted you.

TC: Oh... [one child walks away from crowd with head down:] So we dip into the quantum storm just often enough to be helpful.. neat! How does every cell know how to follow the recipe? Is there a DNA dictator who tells everyone what to do?

GS: Nope! Organisms are more democratic than that. Every cell gets a cloned copy of the recipe. It's a bit like a collection of local governments all based on the same constitution but that each make decisions based on local conditions.

TC: Wow... you really are the smartest grandpa in the world!

GS: Ho, ho, ho! [pats child on head again:] Yes, I know. Now, here; take this bratwurst and run along! I have to go solve the mysteries of dark matter and energy, explain consciousness, and prove P=NP.

[BookHunter M ُH َM َD · Rating 3 out of 5]

شرودنجر هو أحد أعلام الفيزياء و بالذات نظرية الكم فهو أحد ثلاثة لهم أسماء رنانة في صياغة الفيزياء الحديثة بعد آينشتين و هم ماكس بانك و هايزنبرج بالإضافة إليه.
هو هنا يتصدى لقضية لا تخصه و لكن من زاوية يمتلكها تماما و هي البحث في ماهية الحياة من الناحية الفيزيائية.
كيف تعمل هذه الألات الضخمة التي تسمى الكائنات الحية.
يفترض أن الجين عبارة عن جزيء يتصرف طبقا لنظرية الكم و عندما ينتقل من مستوى للطاقة إلى مستوى أخر تحدث الطفرات و هو شيء نادر جدا لأنه يتطلب ظروف صعبة ليكون هذا التحول مستقرا طبقا لقوانين الفيزياء و بذلك يحدث التحول البطيء للكائنات من خلال التطور.
شغلته كثيرا قضية استعصاء الكائنات الحية على التحلل كقانون طبيعي للفيزياء و لكنه أثبت أن المانع من ذلك هو ببساطه أنها تحصل على المزيد من الطاقة باستمرار عن طريق تناول الطعام و من ثم يبدأ التحول عند التوقف عن ذلك بالموت. هل في هذا معلومة جديدة؟ بالطبع لا و لكن الجديد هو اثبات ذلك علميا و بالأحرى فيزيائيا و من خلال نظرية الكم أيضا.
يتلاشى الخط الفاصل في النهاية بين الفلسفة و الفيزياء عندما يبدأ في عرض استنتاجه و يتحدث عن الوعي و الفناء و الوجود و التعدد.
في النهاية نجح الكتاب الصغير في عرض بعض الأفكار الصعبة و تبسيطها و إضافة معلومات مهمة من زاوية مختلفة و لكن دون الإجابة عن السؤال الأساسي الذي طرحه في البداية. ما الحياة؟

[Infinite Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever found yourself, in a fit of intense THC induced synesthesia, being unable to pry the taste of yellow from your tongue with a wire brush? What, you don't like banana runts? JOIN THE REST OF THE FUCKING NORMIES! No. Let me start again. Have you ever wondered what characteristics a thing must exhibit before it can be considered living? Then I’m about to persuade you to read this book by way of a tenuously connected piece of post apocalyptic fiction pertinent to our times, in which a pathogen, engineered by the US military, has produced a giant race of war-platypi which now dominate the earth. Here we will explore the ecology of humanity’s great nemesis in order to better conceptualize the issue:

Against the better judgement of your peers, you decided that a massive collection of saccharine shoujo manga should occupy the principal volume of your modest bunker, instead of additional grape nuts, canned peaches, throwing stars, or classic literature. When confronted about this seemingly incoherent logic, you replied: “Well, if the apocalypse kills romantic comedy, all the pasta in the world ain’t gonna mend this broken heart.” Your friends and family found this bit of wisdom moving, and said no more. But now your provisions are scant, you’ve cried your body weight in unrequited loves, unshipped power couples, and unfinished series. And, what’s worse, you’ve exacerbated your carpel tunnel from writing fan fiction and sketching seedy doujins when you should’ve been searching for other survivors. It’s time for a change. You kneel before the only spiritual paraphernalia you saw fit to place inside this sterile capsule. Issuing soft prayers first to the poster of George Carlin, who symbolizes courage and irreverence. Secondly to a large statue of the Kool-aid man, who represents raw power and disdain for artificial barriers. And lastly, a print of Dita Von Teese, at the pinnacle of her burlesque, bathing in a martini glass. Because you’re tasteful bacchanalian pervert who has never gained much traction with deities of wisdom, so fuck ‘em. You take up the only weapon you allowed yourself, one that perfectly suits your diminutive physique - a ceremonial Zweihänder - and strap it to your back. The weight would be reassuring if not so crushing.

(Nutrition) A war platypus consumes its surroundings indiscriminately to provide itself energy. Derelict shopping carts, shrubs, canned cheeseburgers, naked mole rats, and terrified people make for a complex macronutrient profile which provides the raw materials for metabolic function. Meanwhile you’re stomping around the foothills of Kentucky looking for dry land fish (morels), dragging that lodestone of a weapon behind you and cursing the complete bastard that swindled you into buying it by regaling you with obvious hyperbole surrounding the battle prowess of Teutonic Knights. You were vaguely aware that the Mongols whooped the ever loving piss outta them. Why the hell didn’t you look into becoming proficient in horse archery?

(Respiration) This is the way in which these weaponized varmints, through complex biochemical pathways, turn all that squirrel gravy into the petrol that powers their funny looking, but terrifyingly fast and destructively insatiable, kinda waddling, kinda scuttling, kinda rampaging locomotion. (Movement) Once, while digging up roots and tubers with that goddamn slab of metal you’ve been using as a walking stick, you saw one of those big bastards wild as piss off consuming an entire clutch of hypnotic toads. In sweaty fascination you observed the absolute maniac, in a fitful waller, carve hateful gashes into the earth, bend trees cock-eyed, crush a mule deer into paste, and render totally inoperable the ATV you’d boosted.

(Sensitivity) As misfortune would have it, these organisms have been engineered to resist any chemical attempt to pacify their wanton violence, and as such, recover from tripping balls with horrifying alacrity. They’re also equipped with excellent visual acuity, an olfactory sense that would blast the hair off a grizzly’s ass, and (here’s something most people don’t know) electrolocation. Needless to say, all would-be Peeping Toms are inexorably shagged. (Excrement) Well, this is better left to the imagination. But, given the circumstances, I think it’s forgivable to have a malfunctioning of bladder and bowel. Briefly: this is necessary to get rid of waste that, if allowed to build up within cells, would poison and kill the organism.

(Movement) You set outta there like a sex starved succubus fleeing long internment at a nunnery. Moving your gangling ass with a grace heretofore unseen thanks to a blistering shot of adrenaline. Screaming:

“OH DEAR SWEET DITA! This egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed colossus is gaining on me! Did you know it’s one of the few species of venomous mammal?! (Growth) And the male has a spur the size of a Clydesdale on it’s hind foot that’s capable of delivering a neurotoxin that instills in its victim a fatal desire for lasagna?! Which is a dreadful affliction to have in a world of scarcity!”

Shouting zoological trivia at the top of your lungs happens to be a nervous tic of yours.

(Reproduction) You come to a clearing and find an enormous collection of eggs, and some haggard looking bastard shoveling out the contents of of one. He pivots with nervous energy upon your arrival and shrieks:

“That’s an incredible sword you’ve got there, lady! You get that at the trading post?! OH CHRIST YOU’VE LED IT STRAIGHT TO US!”

Well, look, the book is nothing like this. But imagine everything I wrote, expect more coherent and chocked full of penetrating insight from a brilliant physicist (who is arguably the father of all cat memes), speculating from atop the ramparts of the most fundamental of the sciences on matters of: 4D human centipedes consuming disorder and shitting out negative entropy. Diffusion. Quantum mechanical processes which might underlie biology. The likely “aperiodic” crystal structure of heredity (bear in mind this was written years in advance of Watson & Crick). The omnipresent second law of thermodynamics. And finally matters of determinism, freewill, and consciousness.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1943, a scientist, at one remove from the world of biology, gave a series of lectures in Dublin - called provocatively ‘What Is Life?’.

Erwin Schrödinger, had shared the Nobel prize in physics in 1933 for laying the foundations of wave mechanics. In his Dublin lectures, Schrödinger addressed what puzzled many students — why biology was treated as a subject completely separate from physics and chemistry: frogs, fruit-flies and cells on one side, atoms and molecules, electricity and magnetism, on the other. The time had come, Schrödinger declared, to think of living organisms in terms of their molecular and atomic structure. There was no great divide between the living and non-living; they all obey the same laws of physics and chemistry.

He put a physicist’s question to biology. If entropy is (according to the second law of thermodynamics) things falling apart, the natural disintegration of order into disorder, why don’t genes decay? Why are they instead passed intact from generation to generation?
He gave his own answer. ‘Life’ is matter that is doing something. The technical term is metabolism — ‘eating, drinking, breathing, assimilating, replicating, avoiding entropy’. To Schrodinger, life could be defined as ‘negative entropy’ — something not falling into chaos and approaching ‘the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death’. Genes, he said, preserve their structure because the chromosome that carries them is an 'irregular crystal'. The arrangement of units within the crystal constitutes the hereditary code.

The lectures were published as a book the following year, ready for physicists to read just as the war ended and they looked for new frontiers to explore. To this new breed, “What Is Life?” was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of biology — a small book that started a revolution. For post-war physicists, suffering from professional malaise, Schrödinger showed a new way forward - ‘When one of the inventors of quantum mechanics could ask ‘‘What is life?’’, they were confronted with a fundamental problem worthy of their mettle.’ Biological problems could now be tackled with their own language, physics. The first half of the Twentieth-century science belonged to physics, with the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and nuclear fission. The second half would belong to biology.

[Orhan Pelinkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many people give themselves the task to comprehend the present knowledge available in a particular field of their interest. This is not easy, but it seems like, Schrodinger, was capable of achieving this task, but not only this, he also created new knowledge in his field of profession of physics and introduced the wave function of a quantum mechanical system. His brilliance doesn't stop there, he foresees and describes what is yet to be discovered in other fields of study, genetics in particular, and contributed to discovery of the DNA.

What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (1944) is written by Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), an Austrian quantum physicist intrigued by genetics and philosophy.

What is life in a physical sense? A phenomenon of living cells that constitute living organisms. A four-dimensional pattern of atoms. An unlikely assembly of cooperating molecules. A system capable of decreasing its entropy (measurement of disorder) by continuously extracting and feeding itself the energy from the environment to maintain its low level of entropy and stay alive.

Schrodinger argued that we possess a hereditary molecule which contains: "...a fairly complete code-script of the 'pattern' is contained in every single set of chromosomes." furthermore "...the nucleus of the fertilized egg, could contain an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organisms". Schrodinger, with this book, that is based on the lectures he gave in 1943 in Dublin, contributed and partly influenced the men and women 10 years later to uncover the double helix structure and form of the DNA.

In the second half of the book, Schrodinger, observes Life through the prism of metaphysics. Discussing consciousness, mind and matter, and the scientific knowledge that is, at the end of the day, based on the perception of our delicate senses. Perhaps too much for a nearly 200 page book, but it was one of the more inspiring reads for me this year. I appreciated that, even thought Schrodinger was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, his point of view on life was not only considered through the angle of science which can lack the feelings that provide meaning and purpose to our lives.

(4.5/5.0)

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can Physics account fully for the mysteries of Biology? This is what Schrödinger wants to know. He ends up writing something half-mystical, half-radical and fully-confusing, as Manny says in another review to this book. Now the beauty of any sufficiently confusing book by a good/great scientist is that it is capable of triggering inspiration many times over.

These lectures which are mostly musings on a nascent new branch of science (genetics) in the light of another nascent new branch of science (quantum physics) inspired Haldane, Watson, Crick, Wilkins, etc. to take some of the greatest scientific leaps of the modern world. We shouldn't bet against it inspiring more even today - perhaps the next round of disciples will come from among the ones who pursue AI today? Just a hunch.

[Chris Feldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This along with Heisenberg's "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science" and "Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics" are what you want to read instead of "The Tao Of Physics" and "Dancing Wu Li Masters."

[Rajat Ubhaykar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A naive physicist honestly ponders upon the mysteries of life, he just happens to be Erwin Schrodinger. However a word of warning, this book may be disconcerting to the truly naive physicist. Schrodinger admits the inability of physics to comprehend the living organism, the need for extra-physical laws to explain life as it is.

However, he lays a groundwork based on existing physical laws to come to terms with life and going along his train of thought also happens to predict the existence of DNA years before its discovery.

A scientific man's interpretations of the philosophical questions raised by the title was particularly interesting and insightful. His eventual turn to Indian philosophy for lucidity was effortless and apparently essential. However, what is particularly interesting is how his final question is not 'What is Life?', but 'What is this I?'.

[Vasil Dakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Тази малка книга е просто феноменална! Изисква известна предварителна подготовка по квантова механика, както и ясното съзнание за статистическата природа на законите, които управляват елементарните частици. Шрьодингер излага хипотезата за връзка между квантовите скокове на частиците които изграждат молекулите на живата материя и устойчивите генетични мутации… Втората част на книгата повдига дълбоки философски въпроси за живота, съзнанието и т.н.

[Nick Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pound-for-pound, quite possibly the most exciting book (outside of math/CS textbooks) I've ever read. Every home should have a copy.

[Elinor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written after DNA has been discovered in the 19th century, and before Watson and Crick discover its helix structure in the 1950s, this makes for an interesting piece. Imagine taking a look at the knowledge surrounding genotype/phenotype as it stood at the time through the eyes of a physician who has taken great interest in chemistry and biology? That's this book.

The prologue is very funny but Schrödinger's real message comes right at the end of the book. Interesting thoughts.

[Gendou · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well thought out paper by a brilliant physicist.

Would have given it five stars, but it happened to be remedial for me, but it may be more informative to you, so check it out!

It's sort of eerie to hear Schrodinger contemplate with fascination and wonder something so obvious today as the nature of the DNA molecule.
He gets a lot of stuff right, considering he's going on very limited evidence.
Sometimes he plays devil's advocate in too convincing a way, a befuddling habit.
His conclusion, mainly regarding life as a processor of "free energy" or "negative entropy" is, along with being right on the money, respectably insightful for his time.

[Rama Rao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erwin Schrödinger: The man and his vision

This is another great work of Erwin Schrodinger which gives an insight into the biology of life from a physicist's perspective that inspired scientists like; Francis Crick who discovered the structure of DNA, J.B.S. Haldane, and Roger Penrose. It is clear from this work and other books of Schrodinger that he was one of the few physicists who deeply thought of the inner most secrets of life. This book is divided into two parts: What's Life (7 chapters) and Mind and Matter (6 chapters).

The physicist's most dreaded weapon, the mathematical deduction can not be used for life because it is too complex to be accessible to equations. The orderliness required for the preservation of life does not come by the random heat motions of atoms and molecules, but statistical averages that provide order. Schrodinger asks a simple question; why is life made of so many atoms and not just a few. He offers three examples; higher magnetic fields, increase in molecular population and the error introduced into a reaction rate constant or any other physical parameter would be far too great if only few molecules are involved to form life. Hence orderliness, and of course evolution and diversity of life, requires very large population of molecules.

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories; all existing objectively and all scientific knowledge is based on sense of perception and nonetheless the scientific views of material processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and can not account for the latter. Theories that are developed from scientific observations of experiments never account for sensual qualities. The sentient, percipient and thinking ego does not figure anywhere in our world picture, because it is itself the world picture. It is identified with the whole and not part of it. The physical world lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make the subject of cognizance. It is colorless, soundless, and impalpable. The world is deprived of everything that makes sense in its in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving, and feeling the subject; no personal god can form part of world model that has only became accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. God is missing from spacetime picture like sense of perception or ones own personality. Upanisads (Hindu Scripture) states that Atman = Brahman, the personal self equal the all comprehending eternal self. Consciousness never experienced in plural only in the singular, and plurality is merely a series of different aspect of one soul and one conscious produced by a deception (Maya). There is no multiplicity of minds; in reality and truth there is only one mind.

Before and after is not a quality of the world we perceive but pertains to the perceiving mind and don't imply the notion of space and time. After relativity, the notion of before and after reside on the cause and effect relationship. The general directedness of all happenings is explained by the mechanical or statistical theory of heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that order changes to disorder but not disorder to order, and time travels in one direction from past to future, but not future to past. The statistical theory of time has a stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than theory of relativity. The latter presupposes unidirectional flow of time while statistical theory constructs from order of events.

My body functions according to laws of nature, but I direct body motions. The word "I" means to state that I who control the motion of the atoms and molecules according to the Laws of Nature. The uncertainty principle and the lack of causal connection in nature introduce certain features into physical reality. For example, we can not make any factual statement about a physical system without interacting with it which would change the physical state of the system. This explains why no complete description of any physical object is ever possible. These laws have pushed the boundary between the subject and object. In fact subject and object are only one, and no barrier exists. It is the same element that goes to compose my mind and the world. The situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of cross references between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived.

The last chapter gives brief autobiographical sketches of Schrodinger translated by his granddaughter. Schrödinger was deeply philosophical with strong family: He loved and respected his parents. His strong interest in physics and Vedanta philosophy (one of the six schools of Hindu Philosophy) is apparent, but he shy's away from writing about his complex personal life that involved many women and numerous extramarital affairs.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schrodinger wrote “What is Life?” in 1944, just a few years before Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA's structure. Schrodinger, a physicist writing about the fundamental juncture between life and non-life, flirts with a quantum theory of biology where mutations behave in “jump-like” fashion. Moving through evolutionary time as whole units leads, he believes, to life's stability in the face of ever-present forces of entropy. At its core, because of this stability, life is an effective counter-force to the entropic pressures toward heat dissipation and disorder. Life, through its seeking and defending behavior, is able to stay alive, for awhile. Through the importation of external energy (“continually sucking orderliness from its environment,” life is able to avoid “the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium'” or heat death. In contrast to non-life, where order moves to disorder, life is able to draw upon order (“less complicated organic compounds which serve them as foodstuffs”) to maintain order. Schrodinger is clear, however, that the laws of physics remain in place. Life is able to maintain order for a time, but in death, life rejoins non-life's march to thermal equilibrium.

In Mind and Matter, a series of lectures he gave in 1956, Schrodinger makes several hard to follow arguments that appear to blend physics, evolutionary theory and philosophy. One of his arguments is that “increasing mechanization and 'stupidization' of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence.” This will lead the unintelligent man to settle down to “beget offspring,” which will lead to “a negative [evolutionary] selection as regards talents and gifts.” That seems elitist as well as Lamarckian. Schrodinger also gives a nod to the Upanishads that behind all diversity lies oneness. It's not clear why Schrodinger moves in this direction. It could be that he sees mind as spirit or god, and not of space and time. While mind might see some underlying oneness, in real time, as live matter and energy, we compete and kill as well as love and cooperate.

[Anastasia Tuple · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part was perfect for Physicists, Chemists, Engineers, etc; the second one was perfect for literature- and philosophy-lovers. So, all must be satisfied!

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this almost 10 years ago and it was time to reread and think on it some more.

This book consists of both What is Life and Mind and Matter. In What is Life, Schrödinger attempts to provide a new understanding of living organisms by using thermodynamics as a backdrop. Life seems so organized. If it were subject to the second law of thermodynamics, we would expect that molecules would decay to lower energy states. They do not. In fact they remain at higher energy states through the lifespan and one organisms seems to endow future generations with this ability to resist entropy as well. The unit if heredity that provides such an advantage is called an aperiodic crystal, later termed DNA.

Schrödinger explained that life can resist entropy because of metabolism. An inanimate object cannot take in a nutrient source, such as photons of light that carry energy from the sun, but an animate object can take in nutrients and use the energy from the nutrients (photons, carbon, oxygen) to resist entropy. Thanks to Schrödinger, we were able to begin looking at life, and indeed evolution, through the thermodynamical lens. From this perspective, researchers have been able to measure the intake and output of cells and larger organisms and calculate that the amount of energy organisms release is overwhelmingly more than the reduced entropy their bodies maintains by being ordered. Adam Rutherford provides a wonderfully updated understanding of Schrödinger's ideas as well as later research on the thermodynamics of life. HIs book Creation is definitely worth reading if you want to know more about Schrödinger's ideas.

Mind and Matter is more philosophical than What is Life. It focuses on ethics, how humans understand Darwinian evolution, and questions about religion.

[Fabio Luís Pérez Candelier · Rating 5 out of 5]

¿Qué es la vida? de Erwin Schrödinger, ensayo de divulgación que, basado en conferencias públicas impartidas por Schrödinger en febrero de 1943 en el Trinity College de Dublín, aborda un intento de comprensión del fenómeno de la Vida, desde la química y los mecanismos físicos que la mantienen en el tiempo, sugiriendo la idea de un código genético y marcando el camino a seguir para encontrarlo (Watson y Crick, 1953). El libro supuso una manera diferente de abordar la biología, proponiendo la biología molecular y la eliminación de entropía por los seres vivos como los dos pilares de la «biología del futuro».

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Scientifically very out of date, often unclear and self-condradictory. Frequently descends into religio-metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. The autobiographical part completely superficial.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schrodinger is a Trump of biology – “What is Life” has famously polarized scientific community, and Schrodinger’s 1944 thoughts on what will eventually become molecular biology are considered to be both prescient in direction and wrong in details. For example, Watson and Crick openly credit their intellectual debt to Schrodinger’s insights, whereas Max Perutz quips that “what was true in his book was not original, and most of what was original was known not to be true”.

Well, let me tell you one thing, it doesn’t really matter how you feel about significance and/or inaccuracy of “aperiodic crystal”, “hereditary code-script”, negative entropy, or doctrines of Upanishads. It also doesn’t matter that you can legitimately criticize Schrodinger for attempting to bridge physics and biology, while ignoring chemistry. What matters is that he attempted that bridge by sheer intuition, and you will walk away in awe after watching one of the most celebrated minds in physics intuit the framework of thinking about heredity and life from quantum mechanical principles, and then musing on its implications for determinism and consciousness.

Note, this edition includes “What is Life?” and “Mind and Matter”, and both are short and tasty. Rest are notes to self.

Physical laws are statistical, so how to explain stability of hereditary mechanism from physical principles, given the relatively small number of atoms involved. “Aperiodic crystal” comes in handy (he thought it to be protein, later it turns out to be nucleic acid of course, but qualitatively he was pretty damn close).

Uses Delbruck’s model and argues from quantum energy state transitions to make a case for “jump-like” spontaneous mutations. So we have a structure stable enough to contain hereditary “code-script”, with enough (but not much) mutations to power natural selection. The energy configuration of the gene is stabilized by evolution such that natural frequency of rearrangement is orders of magnitude smaller than reproduction. (According to Perutz (1987), Schrodinger ignored experimental evidence available at the time, which invalidated some of his estimates, and showed alternative likelier mechanism for mutations)

There is much more about energy jumps, negative entropy, extracting order from environment to avoid entropic decay, Lamarckism, dysgenics, and evolution but you’d better read it for yourself.

Schrodinger is often credited with bringing QM into biology, but until I read him I wasn’t aware that he explicitly insists that quantum effects are not due to indeterminacy, but quantum energy state transitions. And that brings about some pretty radical thinking at the tail end of “What is Life?”.

Ready? Schrodinger finds himself in a bind. He disposed of indeterminism (in context of life), and he has shown how life, heredity and his body follow deterministic physical laws. He also states that he has a “direct incontrovertible experience of directing own actions”, and taking responsibility for them. From this he is forced to conclude that it is him (“ I - in the widest meaning of the word”) who controls those atoms according to the Laws of Nature. As such he is effectively becoming “God” in Christian terminology, or “Athman/Brahman” in Vedanta and Upanishads.

Naturally, he fully acknowledges the Christian interpretation as lunatic, but he is clearly quite sympathetic towards Upanishads and the idea that all subjective “I”s reflect some aspect of unitary objective experience. Crazy, man, I know… However, it is peculiar the Bohr was also sympathetic towards Vedic philosophy, so go figure – QM is puzzling indeed.

There are many treats in “Mind and Matter” as well. He is hypothesizing about what we know today as NCCs (Neural Correlates of Consciousness), and consciousness as a necessary mechanism for an activity/skill to be learned and internalized. And today’s neuroscientists such as Ramachandran and Christof Koch make quite a big deal of this “zombie” within.

But what bothers Schrodinger the most is “qualia”, observer effect, and plurality of subjective conscious experience. He struggles with the paradox of having to reconcile objective reality independent of observation, with the model of reality we have in our minds, the model that by construction is based on subjective observation by that very mind.

He blames our conundrum on the Greeks, and thinks that science payed too high of a price for taking out the subjective mind out of the objective world being investigated. (For my money, if anything, Descartes is more at fault for that particular predicament).

And so, in the last lecture, he takes a broader sweep and connects Plato, Kant and Einstein as thinkers who contributed most significantly to freeing Western thinking from insistence on subject-object dichotomy. Then he brings in Boltzmann and implied time convention when describing thermodynamic irreversibility (“arrow of time” etc). And then he goes full Schopenhauer and drops plurality of conscious minds. Vedanta, here we come.

[gretafasurf ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tutto molto bello e interessante ma PERCHÉ LA PARTE SU DIO 🙏🏻

[Knigoqdec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Не мисля, че познавам човек, който да не е чувал за котката на Шрьодингер. Онази нещастна писана, която е нито жива, нито умряла, затворена в някакъв си кашон. Спомням си абсолютната си невъзприемчивост към чисто физическите обяснения на експеримента. Въобще, физиката в училище си беше една безкрайна мъка. Но експериментът с котката си има и друга страна, която условно мога да нарека философска. Тя определено и винаги ме е впечатлявала...
Споменавам котката, защото това е идея на автора и на тази книга. Имах известни опасения в началото на този научен труд, че няма да се разберем с Шрьодингер. Само че той страшно ме изненада.
Шрьодингер не умее "да разказва истории" - безспорно е прав за себе си и това проличава в последната част от книгата, където са автобиографичните му бележки. По-разхвърляно представяне отдавна или може би никога не бях виждала. Обратното - началото на книгата е страшно за непросветените във физиката умове. Макар че Шрьодингер се оказа човечен, благ, достъпен автор, въпреки всичко. Впечатлена съм от това как борави с науки, които би следвало уж да са му чужди, и ги представя през призмата на физика изследовател. А най-много съм впечатлена от изложените размисли по философски въпроси - Спиноза, Кант, Лайбниц, Платон и други. "Ум и материя" беше "разделът" от книгата, който препоръчвам най-силно дори за колегите философи, някои от които бягат от имената на физиката като от огън. Аз пък се опарих и сега съм... просветена.
Направо не знам как тази книга не достигна до повече хора... Дано само така ми се струва.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce este viata

O calatorie fascinanta in lumea celulei si a cromozomilor (aceste "solide aperiodice" cum le-a numit Schrödinger). Probabil prima carte de acest fel, precursoarea tratelor actuale de mii de pagini de biologie moleculara.


--- va urma---

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreword, by Roger Penrose

--What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
--Mind and Matter
--Autobiographical Sketches

[Bettie]

To find

[Nahid · Rating 3 out of 5]

ترجمه‌ی بد، بدون هیچ ویرایشی، حتی گذاشتن ویرگولم دریغ شده! حیف چنین کتابی...

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Physics is life for Schrodinger. Biology and philosophy are shades of physics. Using physics as his foundation, he spends the first half of the book detailing how a molecule resists decay and maintains order. A molecule with a compressed code containing a stable blueprint. It’s no small thing that Watson and Crick wrote a letter to Schrodinger in 1953 telling him that this book influenced them to become molecular biologists and his prediction for an “aperiodic crystal” was a “very apt one.” Earlier that year they had published their findings on DNA. That one fact cements this book in greatness.

As a more modern, but lay reader, the second half was more intriguing as he delves into the murky mix of physics and metaphysics while exploring the nature of consciousness. Multiple times, Schrodinger speedily discards Kant’s “extravagance” when discussing how we perceive the world. The notion that, for example, we do not see the tree outside our window but “[b]y some cunning device of which the only initial, relatively simple steps are explored, the real tree throws an image of itself into my consciousness and that is what I perceive.” Pg. 89. Instead of engaging in these mental twists, Schrodinger is more inclined to accept that there is no plurality to consciousness and consciousness is one thing that may have many aspects. However, later the mystery of phenomenon returns when he speaks of limitations inherent in scientific theories:

So we come to this strange state of affairs. While the direct sensual perception of the phenomenon tells us nothing as to its objective physical nature (or what we usually call so) and has to be discarded from the outset as a source of information, yet the theoretical picture we obtain eventually rests entirely on a complicated array of various informations, all obtained by direct sensual perception. It resides upon them, it is pieced together from them, yet it cannot really be said to contain them. Pgs. 162-163.

Theories may seem to account for sensual properties, “which, of course, they never do.” Pg. 164. The greatness of Kant is that this “one thing- mind or world- may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time." Pg. 145.

Schrodinger finds philosophy at its best when it accepts that we populate the world, not that we somehow make our own worlds. Plato was not great because he imagined a world of forms, but that he recognized the timeless truth of aspects of forms. “A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it.” Pg. 142. These mathematical truths must free ourselves to let our mind not be bound by the senses. What our minds can construct cannot “have dictatorial power over our mind, either in bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating.”

Schrodinger thought some would call this mysticism. However, as a man that had to grapple with whether a cat was dead or alive in a box, I think he had just come to terms with science being really weird.

[Nati S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know what it means to Understand?

It comes from an Old English word: understandan. The word consists of two parts: under and standan, which means to stand.

If you understand an object of thought, you stand above it i.e. you can see it through and inside out. You can manipulate its contents effortlessly and playfully.

After reading this, I can say that this man, Schrödinger, appears to truly understand the scientific take on Life.

Here is one of my favourite quotes form the book:

So we are faced with the following remarkable situation. While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space.

[Zahraa · Rating 2 out of 5]

ليس من الشائع ان يخوض عالم في مجال غير مجاله. لذا كان ملفتا ماقام به شرودنكر عندما سبر اغوار علم الاحياء بعض الشيء.

اسما المؤلف والكتاب اعطياني حماسا شديدا لقراءته . لاريب في ان فكرة الكتاب جميلة ، فالكاتب يتسائل عن ماهية الحياة وكيف انها الشكل الوحيد الذي يجري فيه تحول من النظام الى النظام على حد قوله .
للاسف، كانت طريقة عرض الكتاب غير واضحة للغاية . اعتقد ان هناك خللا بائنا في الترجمة ضاعت خلاله روح الكتاب 😞
مع ذلك ، شرودنكر كشف عن نفسه ، تحدث باسلوب محترم ومتواضع مكررا اعتذاره لعلماء الاحياء ، الذين قد يرون في كلامه تبسطا شديدا. اكتشفت ان شرودنكر كان غير ملحد ،بل على العكس ؛كان مؤمنا بشدة .

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essential characteristic of the living organism is that it feeds upon negative entropy. Life is negative entropy in an entropic environment. Negentropy. Life does not collapse into a physicalist ontology where the essential attribute is entropy. Physics and biology are qualitatively different. Biological realities emerge. Plot a graph of matter trending towards thermodynamic homogenisation and equalisation, and plot a graph of intrinsic will of Life to expand and grow - those variables point in different directions.