damn this guy (who was he again?) wrote this years before the discovery of DNA. what an absolute chad he was. fantastic example of some sort of scientific first principles thinking, pure brilliancy in conjecture.

I'm in no way qualified to review this book qualitatively. However, Schrodinger wrote it with utter modesty and took swift leaps from physics to biochemistry while explaining the nature of gene theoretically.
I came upon reading it as a detour while reading 'The Gene' (which I still am reading, great book that too) due to its extensive mention and it being an inspiration to modern geneticists including Watson and Crick. This is a short read (74 pages) with lots and lots to unpack. Filled with wonderful observations and the epilogue is truly a marvelous chapter where science, philosophy and poetry merge mellifluously.
A brilliant mind-expanding read.

In its time, "What is Life?" was a work of genius and it still has a high reputation. However, it must be said that the discovery of DNA a few years after it was written makes much of it redundant. Schrodinger's insight was in understanding in principle how genes might work from physics. We know how this works, so little of his brilliant analysis now feels quite as revelatory as it once must have. Nonetheless, the insights into life and entropy must still be a foundation for thinking about life.

More radical for us, perhaps, are his philosophical speculations, particularly in Mind and Matter. Concerns about the operation of natural selection on humans seem to have uncomfortable echoes of eugenics, though he stops well short of that. (Schrodinger fled from the Nazis to Ireland.) His approach to the mind-body problem though was new to me. (Admittedly, I have only a tenuous grasp of philosophy of mind.) The dichotomy that he reaches, of accepting either Leibniz's monadology (which he regards with horror) or the single mind of Vedanta is stark and, I suspect, unlikely to find favour with philosophers.

Schrodinger's understanding of and ease with philosophy is striking and reminds us that the great physicists of his generation, including Einstein and the other originators of quantum theory, were throroughly grounded in philosophy, in contrast to the dismissive attitude of many modern physicists. Given the advances made in physics in the early 20th century compared to the present stagnation of the field, one wonders whether we might be missing something.

A fascinating curio by a brilliant physicist. Schrödinger ended up being wrong about a new physics to explain life, heredity, and consciousness, but his thoughts are well-articulated and a snapshot of an intriguing and dynamic period in the life sciences.

Sé que es un buen libro, pero esperaba completamente otra cosa. Pensé que un físico con una obra titulada de esta forma iba a escribir un poco más de forma filosófica que biológica, a fin de cuentas muchas de las teorías físicas terminan siendo bastante apropiadas para cuestionar la verdadera razón de la existencia de la humanidad en el universo. Pero bueno, tiene varios apartados interesantes e incluso párrafos brillantes, simplemente no era lo que quería leer.

Life is THE consciousness!