Quantum Uncertainty, Quantum Play, Quantum Sorrow

by David A. Grandy

In his 1944 What IS Life? Erwin Schrodinger offered an explanation of how living organisms realize large-scale order and stability in the face of microscopic disorder--the random motion of individual atoms. Schrodinger, a renowned physicist best known for his development of wave mechanics and his opposition to quantum uncertainty as interpreted by Niels Bohr, proposed that large populations of atoms achieve stability by virtue of their statistical reliability. When their collective action is added up, statistical fluctuations are so small as to give us lawful, orderly behavior. He called this the "order-from-disorder" principle and insisted that it ran counter to the randomizing or “degenerative effects of the second law of thermodynamics, which would seem to prompt the expectation of rapid breakdown of order in living systems.

20 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2008