Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

Author:Carl Zimmer [Zimmer, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887 and went on to become a physics professor in Zurich, where he developed an equation that would bear his name. The Schrödinger equation predicts how a system—be it a photon or an atom or a group of molecules—changes through time and space in a wavelike fashion. But Schrödinger’s name also became affixed to the most famous thought experiment involving a cat.

Schrödinger recognized the profound weirdness that his work and that of other quantum physicists implied. He offered a way to picture that weirdness: Think of a cat in a box. The box is rigged up with a device that can flood it with poison and kill the cat. Now imagine that the device can activate in response to a radioactive atom spontaneously decaying.

According to the leading interpretations of quantum physics in the 1930s, the atom could exist in a decayed state and an undecayed one at the same time. Only an observation would force its wavelike nature to collapse into one state or the other. If quantum physics was correct, Schrödinger argued, the cat had to be at once dead and alive. Only when an observer looked in the box did the cat receive just one fate.

To Schrödinger, life and death were more than just fodder for thought experiments. His father, a botanist, had introduced him as a boy to the complexities of plants. As a university student, he devoured biology books. Later, when Muller created mutations with X-rays, Schrödinger became intrigued by the nature of genes. He developed a layman’s curiosity about “the fundamental difference between living and dead matter,” as he once put it. When a friend passed Delbrück’s 1935 paper about genes to Schrödinger, it became the nucleus around which his own thoughts grew. At the time, Delbrück and Schrödinger were professional colleagues who traveled in Europe’s rarefied circles of quantum physicists. But Schrödinger never once spoke or wrote to Delbrück about the inspiration he provided.

Like Delbrück, Schrödinger sought refuge from the Nazis. Instead of California, he ended up in Ireland, where the government built him a research center to run. One of the requirements of the job was a series of public lectures at Trinity College. Schrödinger decided not to talk about his equations, since he would not be speaking to an audience of quantum physicists. Instead, he would deliver a course of lectures on his private thoughts about the nature of life.

A vast crowd descended on the lecture hall in February 1943. The organizers had to turn thousands away. When Schrödinger rose to speak, he warned the packed hall that he spoke not as an expert but as “a naive physicist.” And he had a naive question to ask—the same one that Georg Stahl had asked nearly 250 years earlier: What is life?

Much of the biology that Schrödinger described to his Dublin audience was not new. And much of what was new in his lectures would eventually prove to be wrong. And yet he managed to frame much of modern science’s approach to what it means to be alive.

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