Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger's 1944 book What Is Life? asked how physics and chemistry can account for living organisms. Noble credits it with predicting that genetic material would be an aperiodic crystal1. Wallace credits it with the idea that organisms draw 'negative entropy' from their surroundings4. Later authors in bioenergetics and neuroscience reopened the question56.
- Born
- 12 August 1887
- Died
- 4 January 1961
- In the library
- 1 work, named in 11 passages elsewhere
- Facts from
- Wikidata · Wikipedia · Open Library
Order and the gene
Noble reads What Is Life? as following a proposal by Max Delbrück. Physics was held to produce order from disorder, as a gas shows ordered behaviour from the disordered Brownian motion of its molecules2. Biology, by contrast, dealt with order even at the molecular level. Noble later disputes this split. Citing Kupiec, Noble argues that physics and biology do not differ in quite the way Schrödinger thought3. Biological systems cannot be immune from stochasticity, so biological theory must account for it, as physical theory does.
Energy and negative entropy
Wallace describes an apparent conflict. Thermodynamics said entropy rises in a closed system, yet complex organisms persist. Schrödinger pointed out that organisms are not closed systems. They acquire energy from the environment as 'negative entropy'4. Ramstead and colleagues state the same point as living systems appearing to resist the second law5. Jaeken and Manoj say Bauer's 1935 view of 'work out of coherent order' agrees with the view of Schrödinger7.
Later uses of the question
Friston opens a 2013 paper with Schrödinger's question about how physics and chemistry can account for events within a living organism's boundary6. Ramstead, Badcock and Friston say the question inspired a line of inquiry in evolutionary systems theory. They propose the free-energy principle as an answer5. Nunn and colleagues list Schrödinger, with Bohr, among those who suggested a role for quantum mechanics in biology8.
In addition to correctly predicting that the genetic material would be found to be an aperiodic crystal
Noble D, 2010 · Biophysics and systems biology · open at passage 4physics is about the emergence of order from disorder, such as the ordered global behaviour of a gas from the disordered Brownian motion of the individual molecules
Noble D, 2010 · Biophysics and systems biology · open at passage 4Physics and biology do not after all differ in quite the way that Schrödinger thought. This is a point that has been forcibly argued recently by Kupiec (2008, 2009).
Noble D, 2010 · Biophysics and systems biology · open at passage 20Schrödinger, who pointed out that living organisms were not closed systems, but rather acquire energy from their environment as what he called ‘negative entropy’
Wallace DC, 2013 · Bioenergetics in human evolution and disease: implications for the origins of… · open at passage 2As Schrödinger [1] famously observed many years ago, living systems are unique among natural systems because they appear to resist the second law of thermodynamics
Ramstead MJD, Badcock PB, Friston KJ, 2018 · Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation · open at passage 1How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?
Friston K, 2013 · Life as we know it · open at passage 1(and agrees with the view of Schrödinger [10]), who saw “work out of coherent order” as the only thinkable alternative
Jaeken L, Manoj KM, 2025 · Murburn Bioenergetics and "Origins-Sustenance-Termination-Evolution of Life"… · open at passage 43while a role for quantum mechanics in biology was suggested by Bohr and Schrödinger, among others.
Nunn AVW, Guy GW, Bell JD, 2022 · Bioelectric Fields at the Beginnings of Life · open at passage 0
