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Friday, August 31, 2018

What Is Life?

Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?

Philip Ball revisits a book that crystallized key concepts in modern molecular biology.
Black and white photo of Erwin Schrödinger, in glasses and bow tie, looking at the camera.
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger also probed questions of molecular biology.Credit: Bettmann/Getty
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell Erwin SchrödingerCambridge University Press (1944)
In What Is Life? (1944), Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger used that (still-unresolved) question to frame a more specific but equally provocative one. What is it about living systems, he asked, that seems to put them at odds with the known laws of physics? The answer he offered looks prescient now: life is distinguished by a “code-script” that directs cellular organization and heredity, while apparently enabling organisms to suspend the second law of thermodynamics./.../

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