What is Life?

"In physics we always study simple, inanimate objects, so physicists find it very difficult to understand, for example, weather patterns, or financial markets. Anything that’s more complicated, it seems that we don’t have the same grasp that we have with atoms or things like that, so I think that’s exactly where I would like to go to with the next three books. Firstly, What is Life? by Erwin Schroedinger. He was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and then in the 1940s he began to think about biology. At that time the big problem was how biological information is encoded. This is just before Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA and explained the whole thing. About ten years before though, Shroedinger asked this question: can I take this very simplistic way we have of thinking in physics, namely that we like to reduce everything to a very simple mathematical formula (which seems to work actually pretty well) and take that over to biology and start to understand some more complicated processes within a cell, or maybe even light propagation, in terms of physics? The interesting thing there is that he concludes somewhere that classical Newtonian mechanics is probably not sufficient to understand biological things, and we might have to use the full quantum mechanics to understand that. And he comes so close to getting the right mechanism for propagating biological information that he almost managed to scoop Watson and Crick. Yes. He just didn’t know enough biology to identify the DNA: he thought it was another form, another crystal-like form, but he was very close to it. Just by using basic physical principles he figured out what kind of medium you need to do this in a stable way. The book is written at a completely popular level, and apparently it was highly influential in the subsequent decades. Lots of people who read it and were studying physics immediately switched to biology. It acted as a big stimulus for people to go into more complicated subjects. The subsequent research was crucial – all the x-ray crystallography applied to DNA – he didn’t have that information at the time."