What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger first edition 1944
What is Life? The physical aspect of the living cell.
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1944
Small thin 8vo., publisher’s forest green cloth, lettered and lined vertically in gilt along backstrip; in the original dustjacket, printed in green on handmade paper; wide printed flaps priced 6s. net); pp. [v], vi-viii, 91, [i]; with numerous in-text diagrams throughout, as well as 4 plates (one coloured); a very good copy, the boards unfaded, just very lightly rubbed at spine tips and a couple of small stains to the rear paste-down; the scarce paper wrapper darkened and rubbed along backstrip, with chips to spine ends and one other, leading to an open tear to foot of front flap (2.5cm in length); scarce thus.
First edition, based on a series of lectures delivered under the auspices of the Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943. Shrödinger succeeds in summing up the meaning of life in a mere 91 pages.
Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian Nobel-Prize winning physicist who is known today for his breakthroughs in quantum theory. Born in 1887 to a botanist and the daughter of a chemist, he studied at the University of Vienna, and after the First World War moved to the University of Berlin, before leaving Germany in 1933 due to his opposition of Nazi power. Shrödinger wrote on the subject of philosophy and theoretical biology for the majority of his life, and it is perhaps unfortunate that he is best known today solely for his "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment, a paradox first devised by him and Albert Einstein in 1935 in which a hypothetical cat may be considered both alive and dead when unobserved in a closed space.
Schrödinger moved to Dublin in the 1940s, where he became Director of the School for Theoretical Physics. During his time in Ireland, he penned some 50 publications on a range of subjects, of which What is Life? was one of the most successful. Based on a series of lectures attended by some 400 people, the book focuses around one central question; namely, "how 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?" Recording the author’s first use of the phrase "negative entropy" to describe the measurement of distance to normality in statistical terms, Schrödinger also expounds upon the concept of a complex molecule with the genetic code for living organisms. It was not until 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick would publish their findings on the double-helix model of DNA structure (themselves basing their publication on the work of Rosalind Franklin). However, in Watson’s memoir DNA, the Secret of Life, the author claims that it was this very book of Schrödinger's which gave them the inspiration to research the gene, and in particular how genetic information can be stored in molecules. "From the moment I read Schrödinger's What is Life I became polarized toward finding out the secret of the gene", he writes. This is further affirmed by Crick, who also gives Schrödinger credit for influencing the breakthrough.
An unusually bright example of an incredibly important work of theoretical physics.