What is Life?
Life requires stable hereditary information and an ongoing physical exchange that maintains organised systems.
Schrodinger asks how the stability and order of living organisms can be understood through physics. Small hereditary structures must preserve information despite ordinary molecular disturbance.
A living cell must keep usable organisation while its materials change. Schrodinger turns that familiar fact into a physical question about information, stability, and exchange with the surroundings.
He proposes an aperiodic crystal as a way to imagine a molecule storing varied yet stable information. This preceded and influenced later molecular accounts of heredity.
Organisms maintain organisation through exchange with their environment rather than violating thermodynamics. The popular discussion of negative entropy is an historical formulation needing precise physical interpretation.
The work also raises philosophical questions about mind and determinism. It is a formative proposal from before DNA's structure was established, not a complete modern account of cellular life or consciousness.
Stable inheritance requires information that persists through molecular change.
A fruitful proposal need not be a final answer. The book helped shape later inquiry precisely because it made a difficult problem clearer before molecular biology could explain much of it.
An irregular structure can contain variation without losing order entirely.
Living systems exchange matter and energy with their surroundings.
Local organisation does not violate the overall thermodynamic account.
The proposal helped frame questions later answered through molecular biology.
Its philosophical conclusions exceed a complete experimental explanation of life.
Organisms maintain organisation through exchange with their environment rather than violating thermodynamics.
How can a cell preserve hereditary information while its materials keep changing and its organisation depends on exchange?