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    What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
    What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
    What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
    Audiobook6 hours

    What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

    Written by Erwin Schrödinger and Roger Penrose

    Narrated by Bob Souer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a "beautiful and important book" by "a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions." It appears here together with "Mind and Matter," his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrödinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable addition to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 22, 2019
    ISBN9781541446410
    What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

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    Reviews for What is Life?

    4/5

    139 ratings8 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Terrible narration. Sounds like a robot and there is no flow in the narrative
    • 5/5
      Very interesting take on the Physics of Biology w a touch of the life lived by the man himself.
    • 4/5
      "We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics." Such an understatement. And what an intellect!

      Schrödinger's book made the New Scientist's top 25 most influential popular science books, (some of which I've already read but I intend to read all 25 in the next year or so) and I was amazed at his understanding of a field so different from quantum physics. But then, he argues that things are really not so different. I think this book, short though it is, may take another read before I can fully grasp what he was getting at. If I do, it will have to be after I read the rest of the list.
    • 5/5
      I had been meaning to read this for a long time. The book is not nearly as exciting as it must have been in the 1940s, many of the ideas are reasonably familiar. And some of the interest one gets is watching Schrodinger grope around the concept of Gene's and digital, discrete information without the benefit of knowing about DNA and how it functions. But other than mistaking the source of gene's for a protein, he did not miss much and another 60 years of molecular biology would have added relatively little to his analysis.

      All that said, the careful, methodical reasoning from first principles about how biology should ultimately be explicable from first principles was still very exciting. That and learning that some restaurants in the 30s and 40s actually printed calories on the menu. Which Schrodinger objects to, pointing out that our existence is premised not on the consumption of calories but the absorption of negative entropy.
    • 3/5
      Expected more science.
    • 5/5
      The classic on the question 'What is life?'. Although old, it can still be read with great benefit and pleasure. The most amazing thing is how Schroedinger could figure out so much about the future of molecular biology when at his time there was so little known. He did it all with logical reasoning, order of magnitude estimates etc, basically doing what a really good physicist is supposed to do.
    • 5/5
      I had been meaning to read this for a long time. The book is not nearly as exciting as it must have been in the 1940s, many of the ideas are reasonably familiar. And some of the interest one gets is watching Schrodinger grope around the concept of Gene's and digital, discrete information without the benefit of knowing about DNA and how it functions. But other than mistaking the source of gene's for a protein, he did not miss much and another 60 years of molecular biology would have added relatively little to his analysis. All that said, the careful, methodical reasoning from first principles about how biology should ultimately be explicable from first principles was still very exciting. That and learning that some restaurants in the 30s and 40s actually printed calories on the menu. Which Schrodinger objects to, pointing out that our existence is premised not on the consumption of calories but the absorption of negative entropy.
    • 4/5
      What is life is a brilliant discussion by a remarcable physicist about the nature of life. How, asks Schrödinger, does inheritance funtion? Does life function according to the laws of physics? Schrödinger discusses the question of what is life from a physicsist's point-of-view, and draws conclusions about how heritance must function, years before the DNA was discoverd. A classic.The additional book "Mind and matter" is philosofical text that I don't find very appealing. As someone said about Schrödinger: "He is a brilliant physicist, but a mediocre philosopher."