1 - What is Life? The next fifty years. An introduction

Summary

This book is the result of a conference held in Trinity College, Dublin in September 1993 which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of a series of lectures entitled What is Life?, given in Trinity College in 1943 by Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, had come to Dublin in 1939 at the invitation of Éamonn de Valera, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland to take up a Chair of Theoretical Physics at the newly founded Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (Moore, 1989; Kilmister, 1987). The invitation followed his dismissal from the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Graz after the Anschluss. Dublin suited Schrödinger and he fitted in well, becoming a leading personality in the intellectual life of the city. He remained in Dublin until his return to Austria in 1956, where he died five years later.

Schrödinger had broad intellectual interests and while in Dublin he explored areas of philosophy and biology as well as continuing to work in theoretical physics. In this volume we are concerned with Schrödinger's thinking on biology. In What is Life? Schrödinger focused on two themes in biology: the nature of heredity and the thermodynamics of living systems. Delbrück was an influence on Schrödinger's views on heredity while Boltzmann stimulated much of his work on the thermodynamics of living systems. For the first presentation of his thinking on biology Schrödinger chose a public lecture. An annual public lecture is a statutory obligation of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and in February 1943 Schrödinger gave a series of three lectures to a general audience at Trinity College, Dublin.