What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches Quotes

“If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian| warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.”
― Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what?”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic;”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“We are thus faced with the following question: Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought?”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“We have inherited from our forefathers the keen
longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.
If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

“I remember an interesting little paper by Max Planck on the topic ‘The Dynamical and the Statistical Type of Law’ (‘Dynamische und Statistische Gesetzmässigkeit’). The distinction is precisely the one we have here labelled as ‘order from order’ and ‘order from disorder’.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“if we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries,”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“ORDER BASED ON ORDER”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“To give the statement life and colour, let me anticipate what will be explained in much more detail later, namely, that the most essential part of a living cell – the chromosome fibre – may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“You see from this again that an organism must have a comparatively gross structure in order to enjoy the benefit of fairly accurate laws,”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Contrary to the common belief, the regular course of events, governed by the laws of physics, is never the consequence of one well-ordered configuration of atoms – not unless that configuration of atoms repeats itself a great number of times, either as in the periodic crystal or as in a liquid or in a gas composed of a great number of identical molecules.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Thus we have come to the conclusion that an organism and all the biologically relevant processes that it experiences must have an extremely ‘many-atomic’ structure and must be safeguarded against haphazard, ‘single-atomic’ events attaining too great importance. That, the ‘naïve physicist’ tells us, is essential, so that the organism may, so to speak, have sufficiently accurate physical laws on which to draw for setting up its marvellously regular and well-ordered working.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Now, I think, few words more are needed to disclose the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism. It is simply and solely that the latter also hinges upon a solid – the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“entropy taken with a negative sign’, which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann’s original argument turned.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“Hence the awkward expression ‘negative entropy’ can be replaced by a better one: entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?

“How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material. (E.g. the German for metabolism is Stoffwechsel.) That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd. Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, etc., is as good as any other of its kind; what could be gained by exchanging them? For a while in the past our curiosity was silenced by being told that we feed upon energy.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?