Schrödinger’s Intellectual Legacy

	Book review on What is Life? by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Robert Pogue Harrison, Michael R Hendrickson, Robert B Laughlin (2011) Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2011 published in Network Review No 106
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The title of this book echoes a famous series of lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943 and printed with another famous series, Mind and Matter. This book consists of five short monographs on different aspects of Schrödinger's thought. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 and is perhaps best remembered for his thought experiment involving a cat, but this book shows that his legacy is a great deal wider. He was never afraid to push the boundaries of his thinking more deeply into the mystery of existence, going beyond his field into philosophy and biology.

One sees the influence of Indian thought and Schopenhauer in his contention that individual consciousnesses are a fragment or microcosm of a single transcendent consciousness Universal Mind. It is interesting that in his essay on mind and matter he quotes Jung as saying that all science is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. In spite of this (one might say 'subject of cognition and sentience') the remorseless focus on objectivity has made the subject retreat into the background, as if non-existent. Hence those who focus on the third-person perspective can forget that this actually depends upon first-person experience. This blind spot can be thought of as a form of not knowing, or not being aware that we do not know, and represents a disconnection between our lived experience and objective scientific or philosophical representation. Sir Charles Sherrington was also aware of this, and was another strong influence on Schrödinger's thought. Heidegger and Wittgenstein are also mentioned in this connection as other examples of thinkers who seek to go beyond the picture they have of reality.

The next chapter explains some of the politics behind the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which resulted in a sidelining of Schrödinger described here as an intellectual mugging when it was declared that Schrödinger's deterministic wave equation was incompatible with quantum mechanics. It is interesting that Murray Gell-Mann, in his 1976 Nobel acceptance speech, claimed that Niels Bohr had brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics had been solved 50 years ago. Bohm was similarly sidelined.

The book now moves on to the legacy of What is Life? and its relevance to cancer biology. Here one sees how Schrödinger's metaphors exerted a huge influence on the development of molecular biology in being preformationist (implying linear causality and a centralised pre-programme for the organism in the form of a master molecule), genocentric and reductionist. Schrödinger lectures were delivered 10 years before the discovery of DNA, but nevertheless shaped the thinking that emerged out of it.

However, a second set of ideas in this same series of lectures provided another conceptual framework enabling people to break out of the limitations of the first one. Schrödinger was considering the high degree of organisation of cellular life in the light of the second law of thermodynamics which suggested a universe of increased entropy and disorder. This line of thinking developed into the thermodynamics of open systems far from equilibrium (Prigogine's dissipative structures) and the emergence of connectivity, complexity theory, networks, distributed causality and self-organisation in the biological world. In this respect, Schrödinger provided the antidote to the narrowness of the first set of ideas, the antithesis to his thesis, resulting in a higher-level synthesis.

The chapter explains the structure of thinking of Crick's Central Dogma and the metaphors underlying it, with special reference to cancer biology. It is now understood that genes operate in a context and that the expression of a particular gene depends critically on the state of other genes in its network, which means that intervention in a complex nonlinear network does not actually lead to localised change but rather a disequilibrium whereby the whole network tries to compensate in order to restore itself to the previous state. With the proliferation of so-called cancer genes, it is now becoming apparent that individual tumours are a unique pattern of genetic mutations. In this way, linear and mechanistic thinking reaches a dead end.

This situation has demanded what Hendrickson calls a holistic turn and the reintroduction of the organism into a new form of systems biology. At a philosophical level, one realises that metaphors in science are necessary 'yet potentially dangerous.' They can lead to reification, whereby the organism is characterised not simply as being like a machine, but actually as a machine. The language of the genetic programme and master molecule is deterministic rather than probabilistic, and a new set of metaphors has emerged which more accurately reflects the complex state of affairs. The final chapter refers briefly to Schrödinger's life, but his real legacy is his work. For those who have read Schrödinger's lectures, I recommend this book as a sophisticated discussion of the issues he raises, while for those who haven't, I suggest you first read the originals.

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