What Is Life (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrodinger

  From there I went to school for the first time, down to St Nikolaus, where I had private tuition, as my parents were afraid I had forgotten my ABC and my sums during the holiday and would fail my entrance exam in the autumn. In later years we nearly always went to the South Tyrol or Carinthia, and sometimes we would go to Venice for a few days in September. There is no end to the list of beautiful things I was given the chance to see in those days, things that no longer exist, due to the motor car, ‘development’ and new borders. I think few people then, let alone today, experienced such a happy childhood and adolescence as I did, even though I was an only child. Everyone was friendly towards me and we were all on good terms with each other. If only all teachers, including parents, would take to heart the necessity of mutual understanding! We cannot exert any lasting influence over those entrusted to us without it.

  Maybe I ought to say something about my years at university between 1906 and 1910, as there might not be any chance of doing so later on. I mentioned earlier that Hasenöhrl and his carefully conceived four-year course (five hours a week!) influenced me more than anything else. Unfortunately I missed the last year (1910/11), as I could no longer postpone my national service. As it turned out this was not quite as unpleasant as I had anticipated, for I was sent to the beautiful old town of Cracow and I also spent a memorable summer near the Carinthian border (near Malborghet). Apart from Hasenöhrl’s, I attended all the other mathematics lectures I could. Gustav Kohn gave his talks on projective geometry. His style, so severe and clear, left a lasting impression. Kohn would alternate from a pure synthetic method one year – without any formulas – to an analytical approach the next. There is in fact no better example for the existence of axiomatic systems. Through him duality in particular turned out to be a breathtaking phenomenon, differing somewhat in two- and three-dimensional geometry. He also proved to us the profound influence of Felix Klein’s group theory on the development of mathematics. The fact that the existence of a fourth harmonic element has to be accepted as an axiom in a two-dimensional structure while it can easily be proved in a three-dimensional was to him the simplest illustration of Goedel’s great theorem. There were so many things I learnt from Kohn which I would never have had the time to learn later on.

  I attended Jerusalem’s lectures on Spinoza – a memorable experience for whoever listened to him. He talked about so many things, about Epicurus’ (‘Death is not man’s enemy’) and his (‘to wonder at nothing’), which Epicurus always kept in mind when philosophizing.

  In my first year I also did qualitative chemical analysis, and certainly gained a lot from it. Skraup’s lectures on inorganic chemical analysis were rather good; those on organic chemical analysis, which I read during the summer term, poor in comparison. They could have been ten times as good and still they would hardly have improved my understanding of nucleic acids, enzymes, antibodies and the like. As it was I could only feel my way ahead, led by intuition, which was none the less productive.

  On 31 July 1914 my father turned up at my little office in the Boltzmanngasse to break the news that I had been called up. The Predilsattel in Carinthia was to be my first destination. We went off to buy two guns, a small one and a large one. Fortunately I was never forced to use them on either man or animal, and in 1938 during a search of my flat in Graz I handed them over to the good-natured official, just to be sure.

  A few words about the war itself: my first posting, Predilsattel, was uneventful. Once, though, we had a false alarm. Our commanding officer, Captain Reindl, had arranged with confidants that in the event of Italian troops advancing up the wide valley towards the lake (Raiblersee), we were to be warned by smoke signals. It so happened that someone was baking potatoes or burning weeds just along the border. We were told to man the two watchposts and I was put in charge of the one on the left. We spent ten days up there before someone remembered to call us back down. Up there I learnt that springy floorboards (with only a sleeping-bag and blanket) are much more comfortable to sleep on than a solid floor. My other observation was of a different nature, something I never came across before or after. One night the guard on duty woke me up to report that he could see a number of lights moving up the slope opposite us, obviously heading toward our position. (Incidentally, this part of the mountain (Seekopf) had no paths at all.) I got out of my sleeping-bag and made my way through the connecting passage to the post to take a closer look. The guard was right about the lights, but they were St Elmo’s fire on the top of our own wire abatis a couple of yards away, and the displacement against the background was only parallactic. This was because the observer himself was moving. When I stepped out of our spacious dug-out at night I would watch these pretty little fires on the tips of the grass that covered the roof. This was the only time I came across the phenomenon.

  After spending much idle time there I was posted to Franzensfeste, then to Krems and then to Komorn. For a short time I had to serve at the front. I joined a small unit first at Gorizia, then at Duino. They were equipped with an odd naval gun. We eventually retired to Sistiana, and from there I was sent to a rather boring but none the less beautiful observation post near Prosecco, 900 feet above Trieste, where we had an even odder gun. My future wife Annemarie came to see me there, and on one occasion Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, the brother of the Empress Zita, visited our positions. He was not in uniform, and later I learnt that he was in fact our enemy as he was serving in the Belgian army. The reason for this was that the French did not allow any member of the Bourbon family to join their army. The aim of his visit at the time was to bring about a separate peace agreement between Austria-Hungary and the Entente Cordiale, which, of course, meant high treason against Germany. Unfortunately his plan never materialized.

  My first encounter with Einstein’s theory of 1916 was at Prosecco. I had so much time at my disposal, yet had great difficulties in understanding it. Nevertheless a number of marginal notes I made then still appear reasonably intelligent to me even now. As a rule Einstein would present a new theory in an unnecessarily complicated form, and never more so than in 1945, when he introduced the so-called ‘asymmetric’ unitary field theory. But perhaps that is not just characteristic of that great man, but nearly always happens when someone postulates a new idea. In the case of the above-mentioned theory Pauli told him there and then that it was unnecessary to introduce the complex quantities, because each of his tensor equations consisted of both a symmetric and a sheer symmetric part anyway. Only in 1952, in an article he wrote together with Mme B. Kaufman for a volume published to celebrate Louis de Broglie’s sixtieth birthday, did he agree with my much simpler version by ingeniously excluding the so-called ‘strong’ version. This was a very important move indeed.

  The last year or so of the war I spent as a ‘meteorologist’ first in Vienna, then Villach, then Wiener Neustadt and finally in Vienna again. This was a great asset to me, as I was spared the disastrous retreat of our badly torn front lines.

  In March/April 1920 Annemarie and I got married. We moved soon after to Jena, where we took furnished lodgings. I was expected to add some up-to-date theoretical physics to Professor Auerbach’s set lectures. We enjoyed the friendship and cordiality of both the Auerbachs, who were Jews, and of my boss Max Wien and his wife (they were anti-Semites by tradition, but bore no personal malice). Being on such good terms with them all was a great help to me. In 1933, the Auerbachs, I am told, saw no means of escape from the oppression and humiliation which Hitler’s taking over (Mach-tergreifung) held in store for them but suicide. Eberhard Buchwald, a young physicist who had just lost his wife, and a couple called Eller with their two little sons were also amongst our friends in Jena. Mrs Eller came to see me here in Alpbach last summer (1959), a poor bereaved woman whose three men-folk had lost their lives fighting for a cause they did not believe in.

  A chronological account of someone’s life is one of the most boring things I can think of. Whether you are recalling incidents of your own life or that of someone else, you
will rarely find more than the occasional experience or observation worth recounting – even if the historical order of events seems important to you at the time. That is why I am now going to give a short summary of the periods of my life, so that I can refer to them later without having to watch the chronological order.

  The first period (1887–1920) ends with my marrying Annemarie and leaving Germany. I shall call it my first Viennese Period. The second period (1920–7) I shall call ‘My First Years of Roaming’, as I was taken to Jena, Stuttgart, Breslau and finally to Zurich (in 1921). This period ends with my call to Berlin as Max Planck’s successor. I had discovered wave mechanics during my stay in Arosa in 1925. My paper had been published in 1926. As a result of this I went on a two-month lecturing tour of North America, which prohibition had dried up successfully. The third period (1927–33) was a rather nice one. I shall call it ‘My Teaching and Learning’. It ended with Hitler’s assumption of power, the so-called Machtergreifung, in 1933. While completing the summer term of that year I was already busy sending my belongings to Switzerland. At the end of July I left Berlin to spend my holidays in the South Tyrol. The South Tyrol had become Italian under the Treaty of St Germain, so it was still accessible to us with our German passports, whereas Austria was not. Prinz Bismarck’s great successor had succeeded in imposing a blockade in Austria which became known as the Tausendmarksperre. (My wife, for instance, could not visit her mother on her seventieth birthday. His Excellency’s authorities did not give her permission). I did not go back to Berlin after the summer, but instead handed in my resignation, which remained unanswered for a long time. In fact they then denied ever having received it, and when they learnt I had been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, they flatly refused to accept it.

  The fourth period (1933–9) I shall call ‘My Later Years of Roaming’. As early as spring 1933 F. A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) offered me a ‘living’ in Oxford. This was on the occasion of his first visit to Berlin, when I happened to mention my distaste for the present situation. He faithfully kept his word. And so my wife and I took to the road in a little BMW acquired for the occasion. We left Malcesine and via Bergamo, Lecco, St Gotthard, Zurich and then Paris we reached Brussels, where a Solvay Congress was being held. From there we went to Oxford; we did not travel together. Lindemann had already taken the necessary steps to make me a fellow of Magdalen College, though I received the greater part of my pay from ICI.

  When, in 1936, I was offered a chair at Edinburgh University and another at Graz, I chose the latter, an extremely foolish thing to do. Both the choice and the outcome were unexampled, though the outcome was a lucky one. Of course I was more or less undermined by the Nazis in 1938, but by then I had already accepted a call to Dublin, where de Valera was about to found the Institute for Advanced Studies. Loyalty towards his own university would never have allowed Edinburgh’s E.T. Whittaker, de Valera’s former teacher, to suggest me for the post had I gone to Edinburgh in 1936. As it was, Max Born was appointed in my stead. Dublin proved a hundred times better for me. Not only would the work in Edinburgh have been a great burden to me, but so would the position of enemy alien in Great Britain throughout the war.

  Our second ‘escape’ took us from Graz, via Rome, Geneva and Zurich to Oxford where our dear friends, the Whiteheads, put us up for two months. This time we had to leave our good little BMW, ‘Grauling’, behind, as it would have been too slow, and besides, I no longer possessed a driving licence. The Dublin Institute was not yet ‘ready’, and so my wife, Hilde, Ruth and I went to Belgium in December 1938. First I held lectures (in German!) at the University of Ghent as guest professor; this was for the ‘fondation Franqui-Seminar’. Later on we spent about four months in Lapanne by the sea. It was a lovely time – despite the jellyfish. It was also the only time I ever came across the phosphorescence of the sea. In September 1939, the first month of the Second World War, we left for Dublin via England. With our German passports we were still enemy aliens to the British, but obviously thanks to de Valera’s letters of reference we were granted transit. Perhaps Lindemann pulled a few strings on that occasion too, despite the rather unpleasant encounter we had had a year before. He was after all a very decent man, and I am convinced that as his friend Winston’s advisor in matters of physics he proved invaluable in the defence of Britain during the war.

  The fifth period (1939–56) I shall call ‘My Long Exile’, but without the bitter associations of the word, as it was a wonderful time. I would never have got to know this remote and beautiful island otherwise. Nowhere else could we have lived through the Nazi war so untouched by problems that it is almost shameful. I can’t imagine spending seventeen years in Graz ‘treading water’, with or without the Nazis, with or without the war. Sometimes we would quietly say amongst ourselves: ‘Wir danken’s unserem Fuhrer’ (‘We owe it to our Führer’).

  The sixth period (1956–?) I shall call ‘My Late Viennese Period’. As early as 1946 I had been offered an Austrian chair again. When I told de Valera about it he urgently advised me against it, pointing to the unsettled political situation in Central Europe. He was quite right in that respect. But while he was so kindly disposed towards me in many ways, he showed no concern for my wife’s future should anything happen to me. All he could say was that he wasn’t sure what would happen to his wife in such a situation either. So I told them in Vienna that I was keen on going back, but that I wanted to wait for matters to return to normal. I told them that because of the Nazis I had been forced to interrupt my work twice already and start all over again elsewhere; a third time would certainly put an end to it altogether.

  Looking back, I can see that my decision was right. Poor Austria had been raped and was a sad place to live in those days. My petition addressed to the Austrian authorities for a pension for my wife as a kind of reparation was in vain in spite of the fact that they seemed keen to make amends. The poverty was too great then (and still is today in 1960, for that matter) to make allowances for certain individuals and deny them to almost all others. Thus I spent ten more years in Dublin, which turned out to be of great value to me. I wrote quite a number of short books in English (published by Cambridge University Press) and continued my studies on the ‘asymmetric’ general theory of gravitation, which appears to be disappointing. And last but not least there were the two successful operations in 1948 and 1949 by Mr Werner, who removed the cataracts from both my eyes. When the time had come, Austria very generously restored me to my former position. I also received a new appointment to Vienna University (extra status), although at my age I could only expect two and a half years in office. I owe all this mainly to my friend Hans Thirring, and to the Minister of Education, Dr Drimmel. At the same time my colleague Robracher successfully pushed the new law for the status of Professor Emeritus and thus also supported my cause.

  This is where my chronological summary ends. I hope to add a few ideas or details here and there that are not too boring. I must refrain from drawing a complete picture of my life, as I am not good at telling stories; besides, I would have to leave out a very substantial part of this portrait, i.e. that dealing with my relationships with women. First of all it would no doubt kindle gossip, secondly it is hardly interesting enough for others, and last but not least I don’t believe anyone can or may be truthful enough in those matters.

  This summing-up was written early this year. It now gives me pleasure to read through it occasionally. But I have decided not to continue – there would be no point.

  E.S.

  November 1960

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Contents

  Part: 1 What is Life?

  Preface

  Chapter: 1 The Classical Physicist’s Approach to the Subject

  The general character and the purpose of the investigation

  Statistical physics. The fundamental difference in structure

  The naïve physicist’s approach to the subject

/>   Why are the atoms so small?

  The working of an organism requires exact physical laws

  Physical laws rest on atomic statistics and are therefore only approximate

  Their precision is based on the large number of atoms intervening. 1st example (paramagnetism)

  2nd example (Brownian movement, diffusion)

  3rd example (limits of accuracy of measuring)

  The √n rule

  Chapter: 2 The Hereditary Mechanism

  The classical physicist’s expectation, far from being trivial, is wrong

  The hereditary code-script (chromosomes)

  Growth of the body by cell division (mitosis)

  In mitosis every chromosome is duplicated

  Reductive division (meiosis) and fertilization (syngamy)

  Haploid individuals

  The outstanding relevance of the reductive division

  Crossing-over. Location of properties

  Maximum size of a gene

  Small numbers

  Permanence

  Chapter: 3 Mutations

  ‘Jump-like’ mutations the working-ground of natural selection

  They breed true, i.e. they are perfectly inherited