Customer Reviews
Erwin Schrödinger: The man and his visions - By: Rama Rao, 27 Aug 2008 
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, & Roger Penrose. It is clear from this work & 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) & Mind & 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 & molecules, but statistical averages that provide order. Schrodinger asks a simple question; why is life made of so many atoms & not just a few. He offers three examples; higher magnetic fields, increasein molecular population & 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, & of course evolution & diversity of life, requires very large population of molecules.
The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories; all existing objectively & all scientific knowledge is based on sense of perception & nonetheless the scientific views of material processes formedin this way lack all sensual qualities & can not account for the latter. Theories that are developed from scientific observations of experiments never account for sensual qualities. The sentient, percipient & thinking ego does not figure anywherein our world picture, because it is itself the world picture. It is identified with the whole & not part of it. The physical world lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make the subject of cognizance. It is colorless, soundless, & impalpable. The world is deprived of everything that makes sensein itsin relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving, & 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 experiencedin plural onlyin the singular, & plurality is merely a series of different aspect of one soul & one conscious produced by a deception (Maya). There is no multiplicity of minds;in reality & truth there is only one mind.
Before & after is not a quality of the world we perceive but pertains to the perceiving mind & don't imply the notion of space & time. After relativity, the notion of before & after reside on the cause & 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, & time travelsin 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 & molecules according to the Laws of Nature. The uncertainty principle & the lack of causal connectionin 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 & object. In fact subject & object are only one, & no barrier exists. It is the same element that goes to compose my mind & the world. The situation is the same for every mind & its world,in spite of the unfathomable abundance of cross references between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing & one perceived.
The last chapter gives brief autobiographical sketches of Schrodinger translated by his granddaughter. Schrödinger was deeply philosophical with strong family: He loved & respected his parents. His strong interestin physics & 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 & numerous extramarital affairs.
1. A Life of Erwin Schrodinger (Canto Original) (Canto original series)
2. Statistical Thermodynamics
3. 'Nature & the Greeks' & 'Science & Humanism' (Canto Original): AND Science & Humanism (Canto original series)
4. Space-Time Structure (Cambridge Science Classics) (Cambridge Science Classics)
5. Science & Humanism Physicsin Our Time
6. Science & the Human Temperment.
7. My view of the world
What Is Life? - By: JFDerry, 08 Sep 2004 
What Is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger
Cambridge University Press (2002)
The structure of DNA & the genetic code may have alluded us for some time more if Crick had not read Erwin Schrödinger's "What Is Life?" [1]. The research lead that Crick got by doing so was how a small set of repeating elements could give rise to a large number of combinatorial products, a mathematical relationship that Schrödinger illustrated using the Morse Code, based on an idea that he had actually got from the visionary work of Max Delbrück.
Delbrück, Schrödinger & Crick were physicists with an enthusiasm for tackling the unknown for the natural world. Crick's own motivation came directly from reading "What Is Life?" [2]. It seemed reasonable to make the cross-over as the infant field of biochemistry was bound to be governed by the same chemical & physical laws revealedin other, non-biological, disciplines. This was especially true given the progressive focus of biology on the increasingly small, until an effective convergence of scalesin the studies of the biologically relevant on the biologically irrelevant. Hence the justification for Schrödinger's unspecific book title.
Although some of the notionsin the book have been superseded by modern science, this remains a classic, written with great insight & modesty (Schrödinger downplays his potential as a biologist), & is worth the read if only as a portalin to the minds of those luminary workers.
By the time Watson & Crick were piecing together the jigsaw that would lead to their grand discovery, the far-reaching potential of Schrödinger's code script had been aligned with Chargaff's finding of a variable sequence of nucleotide bases, & the stage was set for that immortal terminal sentence, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
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[1] Francis Crick (1989) What Mad Pursuit. Penguin.
[2] James Watson (1981) The Double Helix. Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
