What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

by Erwin Schrödinger

Book Overview

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life?, one of the great science classics of the twentieth century appears here together with Mind and Matter. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521427088
• ISBN13: 9780521427081
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Not leading edge, but a highly readable classic.

It is not surprising that a genius would have interesting things to say. Physicist Erwin Schrodinger was an affable genius whose comments about life, molecular biology, mind, qualia, and a number of topics are interesting and relevant even today.This edition of 'What is Life?' by Cambridge University Press also contains Schrodinger's essay entitled 'Mind and Matter,' along with some autobiographical notes. What is Life? is a well paced 1944 version of molecular genetics that is still valid today. Crick and Watson didn't discover the structure of DNA til 1953, so Schrodinger didn't know of replisomes and error correcting polymerase III, but this essay shows how well developed molecular biology was by this time. Crick and Watson were certainly in the right place at the right time by clearing up a minor bottleneck in the broader science of molecular genetics. Mainly what Schrodinger, the formulator of the quantum mechanical wave equation of atoms, wants to accomplish is to reconcile quantum effects with biology. What is Life? makes an excellent synthesis of quantum physics and biology. Where modern scientists like physicist Roger Penrose and chemist Graham Cairns-Smith fail at this correlation Schrodinger is eminently successful. Although this essay is somewhat dated it is stimulating and rewarding to read.The second essay entitled 'Mind and Matter' written in 1956 is very similar to modern efforts in describing abstract neuro and cognitive science. It tackles many of the same topics as moderns Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman, and Antonio Damasio do. Schrodinger artfully blends the idealism of Schopenhauer with his own personal physicist's point of view and crafts a perfectly enjoyable, reflective discussion on the concept of mind. I actually enjoyed Mind and Matter more than What is Life? as it showed the intellectual range of Schrodinger better. His discussion of what he calls objectivation, or how the subjective and objective dynamics of the scientific observer influence one another was great.Lastly, a brief selection of Schrodinger's writing about his own life rounds out this brief, thoughtful collection of essays by a world class scientist. This relaxing little book still exhibits the ability to invoke serious thought about the nature of life and the implications of consciousness.

Something to really look forward to, enjoy.

This book is actually three essays in one book. The first is the essay of the title, the second a more metaphysical description called "Mind and Matter" and the last an excerpt of his own autobiography, notes rather than life in detail.The first of these considers the possibility of science, as it stands at Schrodinger's time, answering the question of the title. Naturally such a question can now be asked since the universe has gradually become a mechanical one with life a great mystery since mechanical descriptions cannot describe life as we experience it. This was not always the case, certainly not before the 15th Century or so when the mystery had to do with the mechanical rather than the living aspects of the world.So Schrodinger is able to ask this, the most fundamental of all the major questions in his and our time. Throughout the first essay he attempts to answer this not directly but rather through what science can tell us about the process that a living creature must undergo as part of its life cycle ie how is the being able to reproduce itself, where does this information reside etc. He discusses inheritance and the Darwinian explanation available in his time, which of course did not yet know of the DNA molecule. It appears at first that this is no more than a standard approach to these questions and lacks any new insights but this is a mistaken assumption and an in depth reading leaves no doubt that Schrodinger thinks science does not and cannot describe life truly using its current approach. I leave the potential reader to discover this for him/herself.The second of these essays is far more metaphysical in character although schrodinger, a hardnosed scientist, does not waffle or procrastinate, he looks at things without sentimentality or any of the fantasies now current in the more "out there" new age mysticism. Schrodinger leaves no doubt that science again is not able to really discover what the mind is or how perception truly arises from any form of mechanism.In the last of his essays he talks about his own life and a wonderful adventure it is. Schrodinger rather than being the epitome of the rational scientist lacking in feeling, as the commonly held assumption tells, writes with great joy and style. Something to really look forward to, enjoy.

The transition from Physics to Biology

Of all the books on my bookshelf, this tiny book which can be read in just a few hours, is one of the most important. Not only to me, but to science. In it, Schrodinger perdicts the structure of DNA years before Watson and Crick built their model: "...the chromosome fibre - may be called an aperiodic crystal."This book is where physics and biology first met. It really is one of the great classics of the twentieth century. It will never go out of print.

Must Reading for the Intelligent Reader

Schroedinger, one of the great physicists of the 20th Century, applied the knowledge he gained in his own discipline to analyze human life. Based upon lectures that he gave in the 1940s, this brief book contains Schroedinger's fascinating speculations on the nature of life, several of which have proven prophetic (including the discovery of DNA). The reader comes away with the joy of having shared in the workings of a great mind. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the book is that it can be readily understood by persons relatively untrained in science or mathematics.