What Is Life? Revisited

by Daniel J Nicholson

Genres: Science

104 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2025

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Overall, there is something decidedly odd about the habit of molecular biologists to downplay stochasticity, if not to disregard it altogether, in their representations and explanations.

We can no longer skip merrily (as some did a short while ago) from quantum mechanics to free will. The organism now has a say in the matter.

I actually agree with Kay when she writes that “Schrödinger’s four-dimensional Raphaelesque pattern [contained in the code-script] was digitalized and collapsed into a one-dimensional Boolean
message inscribed on a magnetic tape” (Kay 2000: 66). Where I disagree with her is that I take this reformulation of Schrödinger’s ideas in the language of information and cybernetics to be evidence of their continued influence, not of their initial neglect and subsequent ‘reinvention’.'

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting look at physicist Erwin Schrödinger's book What Is Life? It discusses Schrödinger's writing of the book, his sources, his goals in writing it, its reception, its influence on subsequent developments in molecular biology, different perspectives historians and scientists have taken on it and the soundness of some of its ideas. The book shows how Schrödinger drew on but also diverged from existing thought and work in biology. The book also discusses how What Is Life is only remembered for a few concepts the aperiodic crystal postulated as essential to heredity, organisms as feeding on negative entropy, and that biology would lead to new laws of physics. The book then takes great pains to untangle how these ideas are misunderstood and to try and sketch other ideas What Is Life contains. In particular Nicholson attempts to reconstruct Schrödinger's particular motives for the book and he locates them Schrödinger's desire to challenge other physicists' ideas about the role and nature of uncertainty and randomness in quantum mechanics.

Overall it is a well written piece that brings together an interesting survey of evidence and perspective on its subject. It also helps motivate the importance and interest in studying the book What Is Life? more than 80 years later.

I read this as a pdf on my ereader there were no serious problems.