We are thus faced with the following dilemma: either the cells of the organism contain a highly efficient 'memory' for all the details of previous events, or they are, in some mysterious way, able to 'foresee' future events.
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"The result of the experiment is that the cat is both dead and alive, like the famous case of the young woman who was both a virgin and a mother."
"In fact, I should say that the world is a picture drawn by ourselves, and that we are ourselves part of the picture."
"I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, ever…"
"I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth."
"Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing."
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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Living cells either store incredibly detailed records of everything that happened to them before, or they somehow anticipate what will happen next. There is no middle ground. Biology forces us to choose between a kind of biological memory so sophisticated we barely understand it, or something that looks disturbingly like prediction — both options equally strange and humbling.
Schrödinger, who formulated quantum wave mechanics and famously bridged physics and biology in 'What is Life?' (1944), applied physicist's rigor to cellular behavior. This quote reflects his lifelong drive to find deep physical principles beneath living systems — the same boundary-crossing that inspired Watson and Crick's DNA work.
Written around 1944, when DNA's structure was unknown and genetics was still statistical. Scientists knew chromosomes carried heredity but couldn't explain the mechanism. Schrödinger's framing sharpened the central mystery of molecular biology just as wartime science was converging on the double helix — his question helped define the race to answer it.
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