What is Life?

Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger’s book “What is Life?”(1944) is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. In What Is Life? Schrödinger raises the question , what is it about living systems, that seems to put them at odds with the known laws of physics? The answer he offered is: life is distinguished by a “code-script” that directs cellular organization and heredity, while apparently enabling organisms to suspend the second law of thermodynamics.

The book was written in a non-technical style, but it contributed to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA. Elegant and accessible, What Is Life? grew from a series of enormously popular public lectures that Schrödinger gave at Trinity College Dublin in 1943, in the depths of the Second World War.