What Is Life (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrodinger

  Such considerations are in some way disconcerting. The thing that bewilders us is the curious double role that the conscious mind acquires. On the one hand it is the stage, and the only stage on which this whole world-process takes place, or the vessel or container that contains it all and outside which there is nothing. On the other hand we gather the impression, maybe the deceptive impression, that within this world-bustle the conscious mind is tied up with certain very particular organs (brains), which while doubtless the most interesting contraption in animal and plant physiology are yet not unique, not sui generis; for like so many others they serve after all only to maintain the lives of their owners, and it is only to this that they owe their having been elaborated in the process of speciation by natural selection.

  Sometimes a painter introduces into his large picture, or a poet into his long poem, an unpretending subordinate character who is himself. Thus the poet of the Odyssey has, I suppose, meant himself by the blind bard who in the hall of the Phaeacians sings about the battles of Troy and moves the battered hero to tears. In the same way we meet in the song of the Nibelungs, when they traverse the Austrian lands, with a poet who is suspected to be the author of the whole epic. In Dürer’s All-Saints picture two circles of believers are gathered in prayer around the Trinity high up in the skies, a circle of the blessed above, and a circle of humans on the earth. Among the latter are kings and emperors and popes, but also, if I am not mistaken, the portrait of the artist himself, as a humble side-figure that might as well be missing.

  To me this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role of mind. On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect.

  Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities.

  Earlier I have commented on the fact that for this same reason the physical world picture lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make up the Subject of Cognizance. The model is colourless and soundless and unpalpable. In the same way and for the same reason the world of science lacks, or is deprived of, everything that has a meaning only in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving and feeling subject. I mean in the first place the ethical and aesthetical values, any values of any kind, everything related to the meaning and scope of the whole display. All this is not only absent but it cannot, from the purely scientific point of view, be inserted organically. If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong.

  Life is valuable in itself. ‘Be reverent towards life’ is how Albert Schweitzer has framed the fundamental commandment of ethics. Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. Produced million-fold it is for the greatest part rapidly annihilated or cast as prey before other life to feed it. This precisely is the master-method of producing ever-new forms of life. ‘Thou shalt not torture, thou shalt not inflict pain!’ Nature is ignorant of this commandment. Its creatures depend upon racking each other in everlasting strife.

  ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ No natural happening is in itself either good or bad, nor is it in itself either beautiful or ugly. The values are missing, and quite particularly meaning and end are missing. Nature does not act by purposes. If in German we speak of a purposeful (zweckmässig) adaptation of an organism to its environment, we know this to be only a convenient way of speech. If we take it literally, we are mistaken. We are mistaken within the frame of our world picture. In it there is only causal linkage.

  Most painful is the absolute silence of all our scientific investigations towards our questions concerning the meaning and scope of the whole display. The more attentively we watch it, the more aimless and foolish it appears to be. The show that is going on obviously acquires a meaning only with regard to the mind that contemplates it. But what science tells us about this relationship is patently absurd: as if mind had only been produced by that very display that it is now watching and would pass away with it when the sun finally cools down and the earth has been turned into a desert of ice and snow.

  Let me briefly mention the notorious atheism of science which comes, of course, under the same heading. Science has to suffer this reproach again and again, but unjustly so. No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. We know, when God is experienced, this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one’s own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time – that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: God is spirit.

  1 Eranos Jahrbuch, 1946.

  2 Chatto and Windus, 1946.

  3 Man on his Nature, 1st edn (1940), p. 73.

  4 In this way the fusion of successive pictures is produced in the cinema.

  5 Man on his Nature, pp. 273–5.

  6 Man on his Nature, p. 218.

  7 Man on his Nature, p. 232.

  CHAPTER 5

  Science and Religion

  Can science vouchsafe information on matters of religion? Can the results of scientific research be of any help in gaining a reasonable and satisfactory attitude towards those burning questions which assail everyone at times? Some of us, in particular healthy and happy youth, succeed in shoving them aside for long periods; others, in advanced age, have satisfied themselves that there is no answer and have resigned themselves to giving up looking for one, while others again are haunted throughout their lives by this incongruity of our intellect, haunted also by serious fears raised by time-honoured popular superstition. I mean mainly the questions concerned with the ‘other world’, with ‘life after death’, and all that is connected with them. Notice please that I shall not, of course, attempt to answer these questions, but only the much more modest one, whether science can give any information about them or aid our – to many of us unavoidable – thinking about them.

  To begin with, in a very primitive way it certainly can, and has done so without much ado. I remember seeing old prints, geographical maps of the world, so I believe, including hell, purgatory and heaven, the former being placed deep underground, the latter high above in the skies. Such representations were not meant purely allegorically (as they might be in later periods, for example, in Dürer’s famous All-Saints picture); they testify to a crude belief quite popular at the time. Today no church requests the faithful to interpret its dogmas in this materialistic fashion, nay it would seriously discourage such an attitude. This advancement has certainly been aided by our knowledge of the interior of our planet (scanty though it be), of the nature of volcanoes, of the composition of our atmosphere, of the probable history of the solar system and of the structure of the galaxy and the universe. No cultured person would expect to find these dogmatic figments in any region of that part of space which is accessible to our investigation, I daresay not even in a region continuing that space but inaccessible to research; he would give them, even if convinced of their reality, a spiritual standing. I will not say that with deeply religious persons such enlightenment had to await the aforesaid findings of science, but they have certainly helped in eradicating materialistic superstition in those matters.

  However, this refers to a rather primitive state of mind. There are points of greater interest. The most important contributions from science to overcome the baffling qu
estions ‘Who are we really? Where have I come from and where am I going?’ – or at least to set our minds at rest – I say, the most appreciable help science has offered us in this is, in my view, the gradual idealization of time. In thinking of this the names of three men obtrude themselves upon us, though many others, including non-scientists, have hit on the same groove, such as St Augustine of Hippo and Boethius; the three are Plato, Kant and Einstein.

  The first two were not scientists, but their keen devotion to philosophic questions, their absorbing interest in the world, originated from science. In Plato’s case it came from mathematics and geometry (the ‘and’ would be out of place today, but not, I think, in his time). What has endowed Plato’s life-work with such unsurpassed distinction that it shines in undiminished splendour after more than two thousand years? For all we can tell, no special discovery about numbers or geometrical figures is to his credit. His insight into the material world of physics and life is occasionally fantastic and altogether inferior to that of others (the sages from Thales to Democritus) who lived, some of them more than a century, before his time; in knowledge of nature he was widely surpassed by his pupil Aristotle and by Theophrastus. To all but his ardent worshippers long passages in his dialogues give the impression of a gratuitous quibbling on words, with no desire to define the meaning of a word, rather in the belief that the word itself will display its content if you turn it round and round long enough. His social and political Utopia, which failed and put him into grave danger when he tried to promote it practically, finds few admirers in our days, that have sadly experienced the like. So what made his fame?

  In my opinion it was this, that he was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it – against reason – as a reality, more real than our actual experience; this, he said, is but a shadow of the former, from which all experienced reality is borrowed. I am speaking of the theory of forms (or ideas). How did it originate? There is no doubt that it was aroused by his becoming acquainted with the teaching of Parmenides and the Eleatics. But it is equally obvious that this met in Plato with an alive congenial vein, an occurrence very much on the line of Plato’s own beautiful simile that learning by reason has the nature of remembering knowledge, previously possessed but at the time latent, rather than that of discovering entirely new verities. However, Parmenides’ everlasting, ubiquitous and changeless One has in Plato’s mind turned into a much more powerful thought, the Realm of Ideas, which appeals to the imagination, though, of necessity, it remains a mystery. But this thought sprang, as I believe, from a very real experience, namely, that he was struck with admiration and awe by the revelations in the realm of numbers and geometrical figures – as many a man was after him and the Pythagoreans were before. He recognized and absorbed deeply into his mind the nature of these revelations, that they unfold themselves by pure logical reasoning, which makes us acquainted with true relations whose truth is not only unassailable, but is obviously there, forever; the relations held and will hold irrespective of our inquiry into them. A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy.

  The three heights of a triangle (ABC) meet at one point (O).

  Fig. 1.

  Fig. 2.

  (Height is the perpendicular, dropped from a corner onto the side opposite to it, or onto its prolongation.) At first sight one does not see why they should; any three lines do not, they usually form a triangle. Now draw through every corner the parallel to the opposite side, to form the bigger triangle A′B′C′. It consists of four congruent triangles. The three heights of ABC are in the bigger triangle the perpendiculars erected in the middle of its sides, their ‘symmetry lines’. Now the one erected at C must contain all the points that have the same distance from A′ as from B′; the one erected at B contains all those points that have the same distance from A′ as from C′. The point where these two perpendiculars meet has therefore the same distance from all three corners A′, B′, C′, and must therefore lie also on the perpendicular erected at A because this one contains all points that have the same distance from B′ as from C′. Q.E.D.

  Every integer, except 1 and 2, is ‘in the middle’ of two prime numbers, or is their arithmetical mean; for instance

  As you see, there is usually more than one solution. The theorem is called Goldbach’s and is thought to be true, though it has not been proved.

  By adding the consecutive odd numbers, thus first taking just 1, then 1 + 3 = 4, then 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, then 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16, you always get a square number, indeed you get in this way all square numbers, always the square of the number of odd numbers you have added. To grasp the generality of this relation one may replace in the sum the summands of every pair that is equidistant from the middle (thus: the first and the last, then the first but one and the last but one, etc.) by their arithmetic mean, which is obviously just equal to the number of summands; thus, in the last of the above examples:

  4 + 4 + 4 + 4 = 4 × 4.

  Let us now turn to Kant. It has become a commonplace that he taught the ideality of space and time and that this was a fundamental, if not the most fundamental part of his teaching. Like most of it, it can be neither verified nor falsified, but it does not lose interest on this account (rather it gains; if it could be proved or disproved it would be trivial). The meaning is that, to be spread out in space and to happen in a well-defined temporal order of ‘before and after’ is not a quality of the world that we perceive, but pertains to the perceiving mind which, in its present situation anyhow, cannot help registering anything that is offered to it according to these two card-indexes, space and time. It does not mean that the mind comprehends these order-schemes irrespective of, and before, any experience, but that it cannot help developing them and applying them to experience when this comes along, and particularly that this fact does not prove or suggest space and time to be an order-scheme inherent in that ‘thing-in-itself which, as some believe, causes our experience.

  It is not difficult to make a case that this is humbug. No single man can make a distinction between the realm of his perceptions and the realm of things that cause it since, however detailed the knowledge he may have acquired about the whole story, the story is occurring only once not twice. The duplication is an allegory, suggested mainly by communication with other human beings and even with animals; which shows that their perceptions in the same situation seem to be very similar to his own apart from insignificant differences in the point of view – in the literal meaning of ‘point of projection’. But even supposing that this compels us to consider an objectively existing world the cause of our perceptions, as most people do, how on earth shall we decide that a common feature of all our experience is due to the constitution of our mind rather than a quality shared by all those objectively existing things? Admittedly our sense perceptions constitute our sole knowledge about things. This objective world remains a hypothesis, however natural. If we do adopt it, is it not by far the most natural thing to ascribe to that external world, and not to ourselves, all the characteristics that our sense perceptions find in it?

  However, the supreme importance of Kant’s statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object – the world – between them in the process of ‘mind forming an idea of the world’, because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two. The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant. This liberation opens the way to belief, in the religious sense, without running all the time against the clear results which experience about the world as we know it and plain thought unmistakably pro
nounce. For instance – to speak of the most momentous example – experience as we know it unmistakably obtrudes the conviction that it cannot survive the destruction of the body, with whose life, as we know life, it is inseparably bound up. So is there to be nothing after this life? No. Not in the way of experience as we know it necessarily to take place in space and time. But, in an order of appearance in which time plays no part, this notion of ‘after’ is meaningless. Pure thinking cannot, of course, procure us a guarantee that there is that sort of thing, But it can remove the apparent obstacles to conceiving it as possible. That is what Kant has done by his analysis, and that, to my mind, is his philosophical importance.

  I now come to speak about Einstein in the same context. Kant’s attitude towards science was incredibly naïve, as you will agree if you turn the leaves of his Metaphysical Foundations of Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft). He accepted physical science in the form it had reached during his lifetime (1724–1804) as something more or less final and he busied himself to account for its statements philosophically. This happening to a great genius ought to be a warning to philosophers ever after. He would show plainly that space was necessarily infinite and believed firmly that it was in the nature of the human mind to endow it with the geometrical properties summarized by Euclid. In this Euclidean space a mollusc of matter moved, that is, changed its configuration as time went on. To Kant, as to any physicist of his period, space and time were two entirely different conceptions, so he had no qualms in calling the former the form of our external intuition, and time the form of our internal intuition (Anschauung). The recognition that Euclid’s infinite space is not a necessary way of looking at the world of our experience and that space and time are better looked upon as one continuum of four dimensions seemed to shatter Kant’s foundation – but actually did no harm to the more valuable part of his philosophy.