What is Life?


Erwin Schrödinger,
Foreword by Roger Penrose
Canto edition, Cambridge University Press 2002

What Is Life?

Chapter One. The Classical Physicist's Approach to the Subject
Why are the Atoms so Small? p 6

[No example has been] more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.

Chapter Four. The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence
Second Amendment, p 55

Transitions with no threshold interposed between the initial and the final state are entirely uninteresting, and that not only in our biological application. They have actually nothing to contribute to the chemical stability of the molecule. Why? They have no lasting effect, they remain unnoticed. For, when they occur, they are most immediately followed by a relapse into the initial state, since nothing prevents their return.

Chapter Seven. Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?
Reviewing the Biological Situation, p 77

An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos —of 'drinking orderliness' from a suitable environment— seems to be connected to the presence of 'aperiodic solids', the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of —much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal— in virtue of the individual role every atom and every radical is playing here.

Mind and Matter

Chapter 4. The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of the Mind, p 129

An example out of the Upanishads an Islamic Persian mystic of the thirteenth century, Aziz Nasafi. From a paper by Fritz Meyer: [...] The spiritual world is one single spirit who [...] when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged.

Chapter 5. Science and Religion, p 146

There are probably some other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer, who first read this from Kant.

Chapter 6. The Mystery of Sensual Qualities, p 154

Is radiation in the neighbourhood of wavelength 590 µµ the only one to produce the sensation of yellow? The answer is: Not at all. If waves of 760 µµ, which by themselves produce the sensation of red, are mixed in a definite proportion with waves of 535 µµ, which by themselves produce the sensation of green, this mixture produces a yellow which is indistinguishable from the one produced by 590 µµ.

p 155

To a large extent the superposed pitches are perceived separately —though simultaneously— especially by highly musical persons.

p 164

Theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which of course they never do.

Cited in Gödel, Escher, Bach, ni Dieu ni gène, l'évolution, and l'origine des individus. See also: Consciousness Explained.
Essays, Biology, Physics
Marc Girod
Last modified: Mon Sep 6 10:07:45 EEST 2004