Erwin Schrodinger — "The origin of life is still one of the greatest mysteries of science."
The origin of life is still one of the greatest mysteries of science.
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More from Erwin Schrodinger
"The scientific picture of the world is very successful, but it is incomplete. It leaves out something essential, something that is very close to us, namely, our own consciousness."
"The greatest obstacle to progress in science is the belief that one knows something which one does not know."
"The greatest change will be in the thinking habits of the human race. It will learn to look at things in a new way. Quantum theory will force it to do so."
"There is no quantum jump. There is no such thing as a quantum jump. It is all balderdash."
"If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough."
About Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961)
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.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Life's emergence from non-living chemistry remains unexplained despite centuries of inquiry. We know the components — molecules, energy, water — but the precise sequence of events that produced self-replicating, metabolizing systems is unknown. Science can describe life's mechanisms with stunning precision yet cannot fully account for how those mechanisms first assembled from raw matter.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger's 1944 book 'What Is Life?' directly tackled this mystery, proposing that genes function as aperiodic crystals storing hereditary information — influencing Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. As wave mechanics' architect, he believed physics and chemistry could explain biological phenomena, making the origin question a natural frontier for his reductionist yet deeply philosophical scientific worldview.
The era
Schrödinger wrote during the 1940s, when quantum mechanics had matured but molecular biology barely existed. The structure of DNA was unknown, biochemistry was primitive, and the Miller-Urey experiment proving organic molecules could form abiotically was still years away. His era stood at the threshold of the molecular revolution, making the origin-of-life question both urgent and genuinely unanswerable with available tools.
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