What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

Erwin Schrödinger, Erwin Schro dinger

Cambridge University Press, Jan 31, 1992 - Philosophy - 184 pages

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. It appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrodinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches, published and translated here for the first time. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable additon to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.

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User Review  - Razinha - LibraryThing

"We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics." Such an understatement. And what an intellect! Schrödinger's book made the New Scientist ...

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User Review  - nosajeel - LibraryThing

I had been meaning to read this for a long time. The book is not nearly as exciting as it must have been in the 1940s, many of the ideas are reasonably familiar. And some of the interest one gets is ...

Contents

• The Classical Physicists Approach to the Subject: 2
• The Hereditary Mechanism: 19
• Mutations: 32
• The QuantumMechanical Evidence: 46
• Delbrucks Model Discussed and Tested: 56
• Order Disorder and Entropy: 67
• Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?: 76
• On Determinism and Free Will: 86
• MIND AND MATTER: 91
• The Physical Basis of Consciousness: 93
• The Future of Understanding: 103
• The Principle of Objectivation: 117
• The Arithmetical Paradox The Oneness of Mind: 128
• Science and Religion: 140
• The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities: 153
• AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES: 165

Popular passages

Page 68 - hitherto unknown, which, however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of this science as the former.‎

Page 73 - Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.‎

Page 86 - 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.‎

Page 121 - Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff. Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself- withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator.‎

Page 61 - It has often been asked how this tiny speck of material, the nucleus of the fertilized egg, could contain an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organism? A well-ordered association of atoms, endowed with sufficient resistivity to keep its order permanently, appears to be the only conceivable material structure, that offers a variety of possible ('isomeric') arrangements, sufficiently large to embody a complicated system of 'determinations' within a small spatial boundary....‎

Page 76 - I wish to make clear in this last chapter is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.‎

Page 121 - Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline ; it is not a "thing.‎

Page 85 - ... fundamental difference between the two and to justify the epithets novel and unprecedented in the biological case. The most striking features are : first, the curious distribution of the cogs in a many-celled organism...‎

Page 121 - In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper.‎

Page 1 - A Scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master.‎

About the author

Born and educated in Vienna, Erwin Schrodinger received his Ph.D. in 1910 from the University of Vienna. He developed the theory of wave mechanics (1925--26). For this theory, which furnished a solid mathematical explanation of quantum theory, Schrodinger shared the Nobel Prize in 1933 with Paul Dirac. Schrodinger was dissatisfied with Niels Bohr's early quantum theory of the atom, objecting to the many arbitrary quantum rules imposed. Building on Louis-Victor De Broglie's idea that a moving atomic particle has a wave character, Schrodinger developed a famous wave equation that describes the behavior of an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. When applied to the hydrogen atom, the equation yielded all the results of Bohr and De Broglie, and was also used as a tool to solve a wide range of new problems in which quantization occurs. In 1927 Schrodinger succeeded Max Planck at the University of Berlin but resigned in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. He left then for England, becoming a guest professor at Oxford University. In 1936 he returned to Austria, but then fled in 1938 under the threat of Nazi arrest and was invited to Dublin's newly established Institute for Advanced Studies. He remained there from 1940 until his retirement in 1956, when he returned to his native Austria and to the University of Vienna, where he held his last chair in theoretical physics. In 1944 Schrodinger published What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of a Living Cell, a book that had a tremendous impact on a new generation of scientists. The book directed young physicists who were disillusioned by the Hiroshima bombing to an unexplored discipline free of military applications---molecular biology. Schrodinger proposed the existence of a molecular code as the genetic basis of life, inspiring an entire generation to explore this idea.

Born in England, the son of a geneticist, Roger Penrose received a Ph.D. in 1957 from Cambridge University. Penrose then became a professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in 1966 and a Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University in 1973. Penrose, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, has done much to elucidate the fundamental properties of black holes. With Stephen Hawking, Penrose proved a theorem of Albert Einstein's general relativity, asserting that at the center of a black hole there must evolve a "space-time singularity" of zero volume and infinite density, in which the current laws of physics do not apply. He also proposed the hypothesis of "cosmic censorship," which claims that such singularities must possess an event horizon. In 1969 Penrose described a process for the extraction of energy from a black hole, as well as how rotational energy of the black hole is transferred to a particle outside the hole. In addition, Penrose has done much to develop the mathematics needed to unite general relativity, which deals with the gravitational interactions of matter, and quantum mechanics, which describes all other interactions.

Bibliographic information

• Title: What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches; Cambridge paperback library; Cambridge paperbacks: Science; Canto (Cambridge University Press); Canto Series; Canto classics; Knjižnica Canto
• Authors: Erwin Schrödinger, Erwin Schro dinger
• Contributor: Roger Penrose
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1992
• ISBN: 0521427088, 9780521427081
• Length: 184 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / Reference; Science / Physics / General