In this sense, the book was a classic 'bait and switch' - the reader expects to learn what life is, but by the end he has 'bought' a new vision of biology in which the question 'what is life?' has been discarded, and a novel focus on genes, information and replication has been substituted.
#WHAT IS LIFE ERWIN SCHRODINGER PROFESSIONAL#
Schrodinger changed the subject in both senses of transforming the professional practice of biology (and the nature of its practitioners) and the less admirable sense of cutting-off the previous conversation and beginning another. In particular, it did not say anything to answer the question What is Life? In a deeper way, I think, the book was important for what it did not say. In a straightforward way, what the physicists got from What is Life? was the intellectual approach: the way that Schrodinger talked about 'the gene' as a physical entity - its probable size, structure - of great stability and yet great variety, and of the notion of a genetic 'code'. When a book of 'popular science' has this kind of impact, it is less a matter of what is in the book, and more a matter of what people got out of it.
Schrodinger's little 91 page book was written from lectures given to the 'general public' in Dubln, and substantially based on ideas from ex-physicist Max "phage" Delbruck, who became the father of molecular biology and What is Life seems to have been decisive in bringing Francis Crick from Physics to biology (who took-over from Delbruck as the intellectual leader), and was instrumental in converting James Watson from old-style biology, attracting physicists such as Maurice Wilkins and Gunther Stent into the field, and others. Then he turned his mind to consider biology - to consider Life. Schrodinger was one of the greats of quantum physics, towards the end of the era in which theoretical physics has been perhaps the greatest intellectual endeavour in the history of Man. In a nutshell, the book, and the men it brought into biology (mostly from physics) and the approach they took transformed - or redefined - biology from the study of living things to the study of replicating things. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable addition to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.The historical impact of What is Life? by Erwin "Has anybody seen my cat?" Schrodinger (1944) was massive- although it has never been satisfactorily explained. Schrödinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions.īrought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a "beautiful and important book" by "a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions." A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century.
0 kommentar(er)
