What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

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Recommended by Vlatko Vedral, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #27 in Molecular Biology, Ranked #31 in Biology — see more rankings.

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... more
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Vlatko Vedral In physics we always study simple, inanimate objects, so physicists find it very difficult to understand, for example, weather patterns, or financial markets. Anything that’s more complicated, it seems that we don’t have the same grasp that we have with atoms or things like that, so I think that’s exactly where I would like to go to with the next three books. Firstly, What is Life? by Erwin Schroedinger. He was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and then in the 1940s he began to think about biology. At that time the big problem was how biological information is... (Source)

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