He imagined the chromosomes to be a kind of extraordinarily stable irregular crystal (a model he borrowed from Max Delbrück), "an unusually large molecule, which has to be a masterpiece of differentiated order." The atoms within the 'chromosome molecule' were arranged to produce a 'code script' that Schrodinger explicitly compared to Morse code. seems to be connected with the presence of the 'aperiodic solids', the chromosome molecules." Schrödinger never mentions DNA, which had yet to be confirmed as the source of heredity. "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos. "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy." Metabolism, for him, was the export of entropy to the surrounding environment. "It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic," wrote Schrödinger, in a small monograph titled What is Life? in 1945. A classical physicist trying to understand biology, according to Schrödinger, was like an early mechanic, ignorant of electricity, trying to understand the principles behind an electric motor. But he also turned his physicists' intuition to the problem of biology.įor a physicist of the 1940s, life was indeed a conundrum it seemed to violate all the statistical methods with which they were used to describing physical systems. Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for his famous equation that describes the changes in a quantum system over time, and he is probably even better known for his poor quantum cat, which was simultaneously alive and dead.
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