Schrodinger’s “What is Life”

Schrodinger begins this piece with the question, “How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be account for by physics and chemistry?” He goes on to show how the working of an organism requires exact physical laws and how statistical laws begin to operate as the number of atoms involved increases (so that an organism would need a comparatively gross structure in order to benefit from fairly accurate laws).

Much of this article was I admit, a little over my head, but I was fascinated by how he described how organisms feed on negative energy/entropy. His argument, if I understand it, is that entropy (or chaos) is produced by living things (zero entropy is found at -273 degrees Celsius) and that death results when living things reach maximum entropy. Due to this constant generation of entropy by the organism, there is a need to pull negative entropy (or organization) from its environment so that it doesn't continue towards maximum entropy and die. The Greek word metabolism means change or exchange, and so if you look at a living things as beings that pull order from food in the form of complicated organic compounds as they generate positive entropy from their very existence, you can almost envision some primordial ocean where life begins, reaches maximum entropy, then dies…..over and over again, until over millions of year perhaps, one of these organisms manages to pull enough negative entropy from its environment and hold on for a time….and then sometime eons later perhaps, the first life form forms that is able to maintain the delicate balance between chaos and structure, and continue existing for a long period. The picture is very different that a anthropomorphic being creating something already perfect and self-sustaining, yet, given what we know of evolution, it is a thought provoking explanation that somewhere in the distant past, some structure (perhaps crystalline in composition) provided the backbone for the right chemicals to attach and that the substance they produced over countless years could have formed a structure that was able to produce not only chaos, but over time began to pull enough order from its environment to begin a process of metabolization. Once this metabolism took hold, given enough time and substances to pull from in its environment, the possibilities would have been marvelous.