Schrödinger's 1944 'What Is Life?' still shapes biophysics
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- Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book "What Is Life?" — based on Dublin lectures from 1943 — posed how living organisms can be explained by physics and chemistry, hypothesizing they need "negative entropy" to draw orderliness from their environment and possibly entirely new physical laws.
- Written before DNA's structure was understood, the book inspired several physicists to turn to biology upon publication and routinely appears on "best of" popular-science lists — though chemists and biologists received it less warmly.
- Schrödinger speculated about the quantum stability of a "hereditary substance" in cells, connecting radiation-induced mutations to "quantum jumps" from his domain of expertise.
- Nobel laureate Max Perutz criticized the book, arguing Schrödinger could have read existing research on enzymes in cell division to resolve his bafflement about how hereditary substance reproduces without being destroyed by thermal fluctuations.
- Writer Philip Ball noted Schrödinger could have engaged with Leo Szilard's 1929 resolution of Maxwell's demon paradox, which connects entropy to information and would have deepened his "negative entropy" concept.
- Caltech biophysicist Rob Phillips argued in 2021 that the book is best read as "a manifesto about the frontiers of physics" — a framing echoed by UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip Pincus's quip that "If you're in equilibrium, you're dead."
Why it matters: For biophysicists at the physics-biology interface, Schrödinger's 1944 bet that new physical laws are needed to explain life remains an active research question, with researchers at institutions like Caltech and UC Santa Barbara still invoking his manifesto in 2026. The book's persistence despite documented gaps shows how a physicist's framing can guide biology even when specific biochemical claims are outdated.
