![]() In part, our conversations are an exercise in deliberately generating an outsider perspective, like Schrödinger did, hopefully to benefit each other’s research. We have often stayed up late talking while listening to our favourite jazz or flamenco musicians. We meet up, sometimes over a drink, to exchange ideas and share our latest musings in cosmology or molecular biology. ![]() Over the years we, the authors of this newsletter, have developed a pattern. What if we were to follow the same process and ask what is life today ? Physics and biology have moved on a lot since Schrödinger’s day. He was an outsider to biology, and this naturally made him bring a different approach. What is particularly remarkable is that Schrödinger used reasoning stemming from quantum mechanics to formulate his hypothesis. Yet, exactly how this is accomplished at a molecular level is still a being teased out by biologists. Today, the idea that genes are governed by a code that programs the structures and mechanisms of cells and determines the fate of living organisms seems so familiar, that it feels like common sense. An outsider’s approachīefore Schrödinger’s time, biologists had hit upon the idea of the gene, but it was just an undefined unit of inheritance. ![]() In other words, he was stumbling across an early description of DNA. He proposed that this type of non-repetitive molecular structure should house a “code-script” that would give rise to “the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state”. But he believed that periodicity was too simple for life instead he speculated that living matter is governed by aperiodic crystals. For non-living matter, such as in metal, quantum mechanics allows molecules to organise in interesting ways, such as periodic crystals – lattices of molecules with high-degrees of symmetry. He said that quantum mechanics must play a key role in life, as it is necessary for making atoms stable and enabling them to bond in the molecules found in matter, both living and not. He knew that the physics of his time was insufficient to explain some of the ingenious experimental findings that had already been made about living cells, but he ploughed on regardless, attempting to use the physics he knew to explain biology. Schrödinger believed that the same laws of physics that describe a star must account for the intricate processes of metabolism within a living cell. In 1943, he gave a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin that would eventually be published in a tiny, but mighty, book called What Is Life? In it, he speculated on how physics could team up with biology and chemistry to explain how life emerges from inanimate matter. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s views were particularly interesting, as his audacious speculations and predictions in biology have been hugely influential. Notable scientists, including John von Neumann, Erwin Schrödinger, Claude Shannon and Roger Penrose, have entertained the idea that there could be insights to gather from looking at life and the universe in tandem. Similarly, to biologists, life is housed in a biosphere that is decoupled from the happenings of the grandiose universe. To cosmologists, complex systems like life seem of little consequence to the problems they are trying to solve, such as those relating to the big bang or the standard model of particle physics. This chain of events also led to us, although we often see life and the formation of the universe as separate, or “non-overlapping magisteria” to borrow biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase. You can sign up for the Lost in Space-Time here.Īt the dawn of time, the universe exploded into existence with the big bang, kick-starting a chain of events that led to subatomic particles clumping together into atoms, molecules and, eventually, the planets, stars and galaxies we see today. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or two to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the universe. ![]() The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter.
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