In 1943, physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a remarkable series of public lectures, asking a question few physicists had seriously considered: What is life?
At a time when biology and physics were largely separate, he attempted to bridge them. His lectures, published in 1944 as What Is Life?,
Introduced a bold idea: genetic information must be stored in what he called an “aperiodic crystal,” a structure stable enough to preserve order yet complex enough to encode life itself.
The book did more than speculate; it inspired. A generation of young scientists found in it a new direction.
Among them were Francis Crick and James Watson, who would go on to uncover the double helix structure of DNA.
Both later acknowledged that Schrödinger’s ideas guided them toward the emerging field of molecular biology.
A decade later, in 1953, just months after that discovery, Crick wrote to Schrödinger, expressing deep gratitude.
He noted that What Is Life? had sparked both his and Watson’s interest in genetics.
Even more striking was how close Schrödinger’s intuition had come: the “aperiodic crystal” was no longer a hypothesis, but a reality.
Today, What Is Life? remains a rare kind of scientific work, one that did not solve a problem directly, but changed the direction of those who would.