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