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Physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961; Figure 2.11) famously attempted to describe life in his seminal book, What is Life?, published in 1944 following a series of lectures given at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1943. Quite apart from some fascinating predictions about the nature of genetic material (that it was an “aperiodic” crystal – a crystal that lacks long-range order – for which he attempted to estimate the size), he also attempted to get at the nature of life.

Figure 2.11 Erwin Schrödinger. He attempted to understand life from a physical perspective.

Source: Reproduced with permission of wikicommons.

Schrödinger recognized that life made “order from disorder,” and, employing the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy (a measure of the homogenization of energy) increases as energy is dissipated in atoms or molecules, Schrödinger explained that life evades the decay to thermodynamic equilibrium by maintaining what he termed “negative entropy,” for example by gathering energy. The phrase “negative entropy” is rather unwieldy and counter-intuitive. It should be seen more as a popular statement about his views on life rather than an attempt to define a real physical process. The notion of negative entropy is not limited to life, however. Chemical reactions such as endothermic reactions (reactions that take up energy) are in some sense extracting energy from the surrounding environment to increase order.

Schrödinger's interpretation tends to give the impression that life is “struggling” against the laws of physics – attempting to maintain order against the ineluctable forces of the Universe that tend to disperse it into disorder. The problem with this view is that it does not explain why life is so successful. If living things are constantly struggling against the laws of physics, why does life seem to have been so tenacious and ubiquitous once it got started on Earth?