A short life of the author
Erwin Schrödinger was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, but his most lasting influence may have been on biology — through a short, brilliant book, What Is Life? (1944), that asked a simple question and changed the direction of molecular biology. That a theoretical physicist could write a book that inspired the discovery of DNA is one of the remarkable stories of twentieth-century science, and it reflects Schrödinger’s unusual combination of mathematical rigour, philosophical curiosity, and literary grace.
The Physicist
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887, the only child of a prosperous family. He was educated at the University of Vienna, served as an artillery officer in World War I, and held academic positions at Jena, Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich before being appointed to the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin in 1927, succeeding Max Planck.
His greatest contribution to physics — the Schrödinger equation, the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics — was published in 1926 in a series of papers that established wave mechanics as an alternative formulation of quantum theory to Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. The equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes over time and remains one of the foundational equations of modern physics. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 with Paul Dirac.
Schrödinger is also famous for “Schrödinger’s cat,” a thought experiment he proposed in 1935 to illustrate what he regarded as the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — the idea that a cat in a sealed box could be simultaneously alive and dead until observed. The paradox was intended as a criticism of quantum theory’s apparent violation of common sense, but it has become the most widely known illustration of quantum superposition.
Exile and Dublin
When the Nazis came to power, Schrödinger — who was not Jewish but was deeply opposed to Nazism — left Berlin for Oxford in 1933. After a period in Graz, Austria, he fled again when Austria was annexed in 1938 and settled in Dublin, where Éamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach and himself a mathematician, had established the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies partly to attract him. Schrödinger remained in Dublin from 1940 to 1956, and it was there that he produced his most influential writing.
What Is Life?
In February 1943, Schrödinger delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin under the title “What Is Life?” The lectures, published as a book in 1944, asked how the laws of physics and chemistry could account for the events within a living cell — particularly the storage and transmission of genetic information. Schrödinger argued that the gene must be an “aperiodic crystal” — a molecule with an irregular but stable structure capable of encoding information — and that the laws of quantum mechanics, not classical physics, would be needed to explain heredity.
The book electrified a generation of young scientists. James Watson read it as an undergraduate and later said it was the book that turned him from ornithology to genetics. Francis Crick read it and left physics for biology. Maurice Wilkins cited it as his inspiration. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 — a double helix, an aperiodic crystal — was, in a real sense, the answer to Schrödinger’s question.
What Is Life? succeeded not because its specific proposals were correct — the concept of “negentropy” that Schrödinger used to explain how organisms maintain order has been superseded by information theory — but because it demonstrated that the problem of life was a problem for physics, and that a theoretical physicist could contribute to biology by asking the right questions in the right way.
Philosophy and Later Writings
Schrödinger was a deeply philosophical scientist, influenced by Schopenhauer, the Upanishads, and Vedantic philosophy. My View of the World (1961) set out his metaphysical position: a form of monism in which individual consciousness is an aspect of a single universal consciousness — a view he derived from his reading of Hindu philosophy. Mind and Matter (1958) explored the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. Nature and the Greeks (1954) traced the origins of modern scientific thought to ancient Greek philosophy.
These philosophical writings are less well known than What Is Life? but they reveal a mind of unusual breadth — a physicist who took philosophy seriously and wrote about it with clarity and conviction.
Collecting Schrödinger
What Is Life? (Cambridge University Press, 1944) in first edition is one of the most important scientific books of the twentieth century and is actively collected. First editions in the original blue cloth with dust jacket are scarce in fine condition. Mind and Matter (CUP, 1958) and My View of the World (CUP, 1964, English translation) are also collected. Schrödinger’s original scientific papers from the 1920s, published in Annalen der Physik, are among the most significant physics papers of the century.