Erwin Schrodinger — "What is life? The answer to this question is not what one expects."
What is life? The answer to this question is not what one expects.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Erwin Schrodinger
"I consider science to be an integral part of our endeavour to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all others, the one that has puzzled man from earliest times: Who are we? What …"
"The only constant in life is change."
"The origin of life is still one of the greatest mysteries of science."
"If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men —…"
"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."
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.
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Life defies the simple, mechanical answers we instinctively reach for. When you investigate it rigorously, you find something stranger and more profound than common sense predicts — order emerging from chaos, complexity arising from chemistry, consciousness from matter. The honest answer unsettles comfortable assumptions and demands an entirely different framework of thinking than everyday experience provides.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger literally wrote a 1944 book called 'What Is Life?' that pioneered applying quantum physics to biology — directly inspiring Watson and Crick's DNA discovery. A physicist explaining heredity and cellular order through thermodynamics and quantum mechanics was itself unexpected. His wave equation redefined how particles behave, training him to expect that deep questions yield counterintuitive, mathematically strange answers.
The era
In the 1940s, biology and physics were separate disciplines. The structure of DNA was unknown, quantum mechanics was still shocking mainstream science, and the idea that a physicist could explain living organisms through entropy and atomic order was radical. Post-WWII science was expanding its ambitions — Schrödinger's cross-disciplinary leap reflected an era questioning the boundaries of what each science could claim to explain.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].