What Is Life?: with "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches"

This brief little book manages to pack more of an intellectual wallop in its slim pages than many other longer books do.

The first essay, written in 1944, is called What is life? and attempts to connect what was then known about physics which was then known about biology to answer its title question. Though the material predated the discoverty of DNA it can still presents a challenger read for the layman. Significantly however, it does raise an interesting a suprisingly complex question about the nature of life and where we should draw the dividing line.

The second essay, written in 1956, is called Mind and Matter and attempts to shed light on the nature of the nexus between its two title topics. For me, this essay is particularly interesting because it really introduces you to the overflowing genius that gave us the conundrum of Schrodinger's cat who sits both alive and dead in famous box to illustrate the paradox that is presented to us under the Copenhagen view of quantum physics. Mind and matter were certainly close to Schrodinger's heart as he was at that forefront of physics which first learned the critical importance of observation in bringing about the existence of quantum phenomenon where trees falling in the forrest litterally couldn't make a sound until they were observed.

The rest of the book consists of odds and ends but it all hangs together in dealing with an intellect who every bit as interesting as the questions he raised.

I was supposed to read this book for one of my classes, and it was a quick and easy read. But had it not been for this class, I don't think I would've ever read it.

"What Is Life" is an excellent look into the brilliant mind of one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Erwin Schrodinger. This book suggested the existence of DNA. Tell me thats not important!! Also, "Mind and Matter" is an amazing look into human consciousness and will definitely provoke many thoughts. This book contains alot of technical language, so you may want to have a dictionary with you or take down the words you are unfamiliar with. Overall, this book is simply amazing, and I'd recommend it to any intelligent individual.

This is another great work of Erwin Schrodinger which gives an insight into the biology of life from a physicist's perspective that inspired scientists like; Francis Crick who discovered the structure of DNA, J.B.S. Haldane, and Roger Penrose. It is clear from this work and other books of Schrodinger that he was one of the few physicists who deeply thought of the inner most secrets of life. This book is divided into two parts: What's Life (7 chapters) and Mind and Matter (6 chapters).

The physicist's most dreaded weapon, the mathematical deduction can not be used for life because it is too complex to be accessible to equations. The orderliness required for the preservation of life does not come by the random heat motions of atoms and molecules, but statistical averages that provide order. Schrodinger asks a simple question; why is life made of so many atoms and not just a few. He offers three examples; higher magnetic fields, increase in molecular population and the error introduced into a reaction rate constant or any other physical parameter would be far too great if only few molecules are involved to form life. Hence orderliness, and of course evolution and diversity of life, requires very large population of molecules.

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories; all existing objectively and all scientific knowledge is based on sense of perception and nonetheless the scientific views of material processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and can not account for the latter. Theories that are developed from scientific observations of experiments never account for sensual qualities. The sentient, percipient and thinking ego does not figure anywhere in our world picture, because it is itself the world picture. It is identified with the whole and not part of it. The physical world lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make the subject of cognizance. It is colorless, soundless, and impalpable. The world is deprived of everything that makes sense in its in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving, and feeling the subject; no personal god can form part of world model that has only became accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. God is missing from spacetime picture like sense of perception or ones own personality. Upanisads (Hindu Scripture) states that Atman = Brahman, the personal self equal the all comprehending eternal self. Consciousness never experienced in plural only in the singular, and plurality is merely a series of different aspect of one soul and one conscious produced by a deception (Maya). There is no multiplicity of minds; in reality and truth there is only one mind.

Before and after is not a quality of the world we perceive but pertains to the perceiving mind and don't imply the notion of space and time. After relativity, the notion of before and after reside on the cause and effect relationship. The general directedness of all happenings is explained by the mechanical or statistical theory of heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that order changes to disorder but not disorder to order, and time travels in one direction from past to future, but not future to past. The statistical theory of time has a stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than theory of relativity. The latter presupposes unidirectional flow of time while statistical theory constructs from order of events.


My body functions according to laws of nature, but I direct body motions. The word "I" means to state that I who control the motion of the atoms and molecules according to the Laws of Nature. The uncertainty principle and the lack of causal connection in nature introduce certain features into physical reality. For example, we can not make any factual statement about a physical system without interacting with it which would change the physical state of the system. This explains why no complete description of any physical object is ever possible. These laws have pushed the boundary between the subject and object. In fact subject and object are only one, and no barrier exists. It is the same element that goes to compose my mind and the world. The situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of cross references between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived.

The last chapter gives brief autobiographical sketches of Schrodinger translated by his granddaughter. Schrödinger was deeply philosophical with strong family: He loved and respected his parents. His strong interest in physics and Vedanta philosophy (one of the six schools of Hindu Philosophy) is apparent, but he shy's away from writing about his complex personal life that involved many women and numerous extramarital affairs.


1. Schrödinger: Life and Thought

2. Space-Time Structure (Cambridge Science Classics)
3. A Life of Erwin Schrödinger (Canto original series)

4. Erwin Schrödinger's World View : The Dynamics of Knowledge and Reality (Theory and Decision Library A:)

5. 'Nature and the Greeks' and 'Science and Humanism' (Canto original series)
6. Schrödinger's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science)

7. Schrodinger's Science and the Human Temerament
8. Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries Tag: Author of In Search of Schrod. Cat
9. Statistical Thermodynamics
10. Science and Humanism, Physics in Our Time

In "What is Life?" monograph, Schrodinger brilliantly enlightens us with the true concept of life science. He proposes what himself calls "a naive physicist's ideas about organisms." Years before the discovery of double helix structure of DNA, Schrodinger beautifully details how the huge volume of information is related to the structure of what he calls "aperiodic crystal" (what we currently call it "protein structure."

The ideas are still fresh and everybody who really wants to start the REAL and TRUE molecular biology must read this classic. It is astonishing to see how this great thinker and physicist had elaborated, very correctly and properly, to use the statistical tools in physics (statistical physics) to explain the fundamentals of life.

It is an absolute classic from a great legend. Please read and enjoy it.