Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944 (viii + 91 pp., with plates;
“based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for
Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943”, per the
title page as catalogued). A Cambridge reprint followed in 1945 (Library of
Congress 45006254), and Macmillan issued it in New York in 1945. The DOI
above is the 1992 Canto edition, What is Life? With Mind and Matter and
Autobiographical Sketches (print 31 January 1992, Cambridge Core 2013; DOI
10.1017/CBO9781139644129), the edition the record would read; What is
Life? is its first part, pp. ix–90. No catalogue record I reached gives a
day or month for the 1944 first edition, so published: carries the year,
as the first of January.
The brief’s citation (1944, Cambridge University Press) is correct.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description, the contents and two publisher excerpts, not a reading. What follows is what those sources say.
- Contents of What is Life? (Canto 1992 pagination, from Cambridge Core): Preface (pp. 1–2); 1 The classical physicist’s approach to the subject (3–18); 2 The hereditary mechanism (19–31); 3 Mutations (32–45); 4 The quantum-mechanical evidence (46–55); 5 Delbrück’s model discussed and tested (56–66); 6 Order, disorder and entropy (67–75); 7 Is life based on the laws of physics? (76–85); Epilogue: On determinism and free will (86–90). Mind and Matter (91–164) and the Autobiographical Sketches (165–184) follow in that edition.
- Chapter 6, as far as the publisher’s excerpt goes. It opens with Spinoza (Ethics III, prop. 2) and a section “A remarkable general conclusion from the model”. It says that Delbrück’s molecular model “seems to contain no hint as to how the hereditary substance works”, but that “there is just one general conclusion to be obtained from it, and that, I confess, was my only motive for writing this book.” The excerpt stops before the conclusion. The book’s negative-entropy passages, which the brief asks for, lie past it, and I have not read them.
- The publisher’s description (for the Canto edition): the book is “a distinguished physicist’s exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology”; “written for the layman”, it “proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA.”
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as the starting point of the “life as dissipation” literature the record is filling out. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Schrödinger” and “What is Life” found nothing.
Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its
publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and
does not rebuild a book from what others say about it.
What the record already says about it, at second hand, and what a reading should check:
- Schneider & Kay (LIT-533) open with it. They say Schrödinger separated “order from order” (heredity, the aperiodic crystal) from “order from disorder” (staying ordered by drawing on an outside flux) and that he expected new principles of physics. They present their paper as taking up “the task proposed by Schrödinger”. A reading should check whether Schrödinger’s “order from disorder” is what they make of it. Their account of him is a nonequilibrium-thermodynamics programme he did not state in those terms.
- Friston (LIT-526) takes its epigraph from the book, cited to p. 2: “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?” Friston’s answer makes the “boundary” statistical, a Markov blanket.
- Morowitz & Smith (LIT-528) cite the 1992 edition for the “paradox” that biomass has lower equilibrium entropy than its abiotic matter yet has been stable for four billion years. They argue that equilibrium entropy is the wrong measure on a driven earth.
- Nahas & Sachs (LIT-192) cite the 1992 edition in their bibliography; NOTE-094 records no use of it in the text.
Priority for a reading: high. It is the common ancestor of every “life feeds on negative entropy” claim in this batch, and three of them quote or paraphrase it. Two things want checking against the text. The first is what Schrödinger meant by “negative entropy” (he is often read as meaning free energy; the text has to say). The second is whether chapter 7’s “new laws of physics” is a claim about thermodynamics at all, or about heredity. The record’s other unread foundation in the thermodynamics of information is Landauer (LIT-328).
Access when seeded:
- Cambridge Core book page (via doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139644129): description, full contents with page ranges for the Canto edition, and chapter pages with opening excerpts. I read the chapter 6 excerpt.
- Crossref records for 10.1017/CBO9781139644129 (print 1992-01-31, online 2013-06-05, ISBN 9780521427081) and for the 2012 Canto Classics reissue with Penrose’s foreword, 10.1017/CBO9781107295629.
- Internet Archive catalogue metadata (its MARC-derived records) for the 1945 Cambridge reprint (whatislifephysic0000schr: “viii, 91 pages, IV plates on 2 leaves”; “1st ed. 1944; reprinted 1945”; LCCN 45006254) and for the Macmillan 1945 and Cambridge/Macmillan 1946 printings. All scans are lending-only.
- Not opened: PDFs at course and personal sites and Internet Archive user uploads of the Canto edition, which are not lawful copies.