Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help.
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"The scientist only imposes the laws of nature on nature."
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively. But it is not a logical necessity."
"The world is built on a plan, a pattern, a structure that is mathematically beautiful."
"The world is a mystery, and the more we learn, the more mysterious it becomes."
"The idea that consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain is an illusion. Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, and the brain is merely an antenna that tunes into it."
Austrian physicist who shared the 1933 Nobel for the wave equation that bears his name and the famous cat thought-experiment. Closely associated with Werner Heisenberg (matrix-mechanics rival who reached the same physics by different math) and Albert Einstein (his pen-pal on quantum interpretation). For an intellectual contrast, see Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and architect of the Copenhagen interpretation — Schrödinger's cat thought-experiment was specifically designed to ridicule Bohr's 'observer-dependent reality' reading of quantum mechanics — Schrödinger thought the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd; the cat was meant as reductio ad absurdum.
Critiquing a scientific concept, likely in a biological context.
Date: Mid 20th century
GeneralFound in 1 providers: gemini
1 source checked
Living things don't stay alive simply by swapping energy in and out. In a mature organism, total energy stays roughly constant — and if every calorie is equivalent to every other, a simple exchange explains nothing. Schrödinger is tearing down a weak argument before making his real point: organisms must extract something more specific from their environment than raw energy — namely, structured order, or what he calls negative entropy.
From What is Life? (1944), written while Schrödinger sheltered in wartime Dublin after fleeing Nazi Europe. As the father of wave mechanics, he applied the same analytical discipline to biology: expose the flaw in the obvious explanation, then propose a deeper one. His conclusion — that life feeds on negative entropy — directly inspired Watson and Crick and helped birth molecular biology, showing a physicist's mind reshaping an entire field.
Schrödinger lectured in Dublin in 1943, mid-World War II, when the physical basis of heredity was still mysterious and thermodynamics was just beginning to be applied to living systems. Quantum mechanics had already overturned classical physics; scientists now wondered whether similar precision could crack biology. Entropy — disorder versus order — was central to physics but rarely applied to life, making Schrödinger's move radical and timely, foreshadowing the DNA revolution a decade later.
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