Chapter 223: Life and Physics
Schrödinger was Earth’s prodigious scientist.
If the literary tough guy Hemingway—lover of fast cars, fine wine, and beautiful women—represented the ideal state of a humanities man, then Erwin Schrödinger, that research-obsessed madman who wrote papers with one arm around a mistress, was the very incarnation of a science man’s dream.
The wine and women that would drain an ordinary person’s talent were, for him, elixirs that sparked brilliance. Living a life of nightly revelry, he still remained one of the world’s top ten physicists.”
His greatest theory, besides Schrödinger wave mechanics and wave functions, was What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, incorporating physics into biology.
The book not only raised the question of ‘life is an entropy phenomenon, taking the order out of the environment to maintain the biological system and evolve it,’ but he also pointed out that physics coupled with chemistry could solve biological topics, as well as show a direction for genetic research.
The book swallowed up many brilliant physicists into this even greater pit that was biology.
Among the three Nobel Prize winners of 1962 in physics or medicine that proposed the double helix model of DNA, two had been great physicists that switched specialty after reading Schrödinger’s book.
Once genetics entered the DNA era, biology was no longer a discipline studying living beings but a specialization requiring mastery in physics and chemistry.
This shift had taken root in Divine Province as well.