An interesting short book. Enjoyed almost all of the "What is life?" part. The "Mind and Matter" part has some rather boring things (for me that is) but then some parts are insanely interesting. The Autobiography is fine for reading once; nothing particularly enlightening.

Language: It is slightly dated but crisp without being pompous. The word timbre was an interesting discovery.

Impression (long): The first part of the book is incredibly interesting. It is titled “What is life?” and the book is titled after this, of course. It starts from describing what one would expect, from classical physics, to be the state of affairs for describing life and reach some sort of failure at accounting for its vividness. The book does a great job, however, at explaining very many striking features of statistical mechanics which on the face of it seem to have a purpose, like drop of ink spreading through a liquid as though wanting to diffuse into areas with no ink, but at the microscopic level are following innocuous laws, moving irrespective of the colour like a random walk.

The other approach is to look at hereditary and work backwards to find the size of this inheritable object. Note that when this was written by Schrödinger the structure of DNA had still not been discovered. He then explains the notion of alleles and how the changes are discrete somehow at the level of this inheritable substance. He relates this to quantum jumps and not in a “The Emperor’s New Mind” kind of way (of which I must admit I have only heard but enough to be reasonably confident) but in the usual way of chemistry of a large molecule and its allowed configurations. He goes on a bit more than I could have liked about evolution possibly because I had taken some courses thereof earlier. There were some interesting things that were brought up such as saturation of changes due to evolution as have been observed in some species and the risk of extreme human behaviours such as wars and improved health care. There were some interesting discussions of living organisms requiring a “stream of order” to survive which was surprising even though partly expected as it arose from a discussion on entropy and life.

The second part of the book is about the conscious mind titled “Mind and Matter”. This part was highly philosophical. The basic point was that in Science we take the observer out of what is being observed. The question of course is if anything about the observer itself can be said. Many interesting examples were taken to explain this. The usual one was about colours and our inability to explain it, regardless of how well we understand the mechanism. The example with how the ears work left me awestruck. The ears have these small string like objects and these are highly damped so we stop hearing when the sound stops. The price that is paid for this is that the sensitivity is broadened. So the brain must analyse this to determine different frequencies. Another example which illustrated a slightly different notion was that of the organisation within the mind. The experiment was that a person is shown exposed to an image with (the exact numbers might be wrong) 15 frames per second and 30 frames per second. In the former the person detects flashes but in the latter not – she sees it as a continuum. Now the same experiment is performed with one eye closed. Same results. It is reasonable to imagine that the information from both eyes is processed together in the brain. The next experiment was to divide the 30 frames per second image into two streams of 15 frames per second. The first stream is sent to the left eye and second to the right. What do you expect the person saw, a continuum or flashes? She saw flashes! It was almost like there are two observers both reporting after an independent analysis the result to the ‘higher’ brain. The trouble with this is that unlike other cells in the body the brain can’t be thought of as individual units of brain in terms of its structure, nerve cells (this part I am not so clear about so read again should you find yourself interested!).

I was at the verge of leaving the book after it got too philosophical when suddenly the interest meter skyrocketed. And this was in the section titled Science and Religion where I was least expecting anything interesting. I will keep this one brief. The basic premise of Kant’s discussion on mind and matter apparently rests on the notions of space and time. Schrödinger explains how Einstein’s relativity changed that notion, without really affecting Kant’s conclusions as Schrödinger believes, by linking the two while Kant had assumed one to be exterior and the other to be interior. He even explained Einstein’s idea wonderfully by using just two assumptions, (1) cause precedes effect and (2) upper limit on the speed of propagation, c. He used this to draw a circle around a point with radius equals some time multiplied by c and say that everything outside this circle represents events which have no causal relation with the centre of the circle. This meant he could make one happen before or after without any inconsistency. This is one of the main insights of Einstein (and many others). The other one was more insane. This was based on the irreversibility of processes in nature. This is beautifully explained by Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics. The main trouble with this is that the laws of physics are valid backwards and forwards for the parameter we usually denote by t. Now the direction of this variable is itself determined by our observations which are a consequence of irreversible processes in nature as observed by us. So whether we use t or -t as increasing depends on Boltzmann model which could’ve picked either. So Boltzmann claimed that in a large enough system it is indeed possible that times are in different directions! Schrödinger claims that our universe is not large enough for this to happen but this does put the notion of space-time in a precarious, elusive and fascinating position and much more so than I ever fathomed. Note that this is what I understood and may well be wrong so do read before pondering upon them for too long.

The last part was about his own life, the Autobiography. This I must admit wasn’t as interesting. Some noteworthy things included the starvation period during the war, his guilt for not being empathetic to his parents, and Schrödinger having to have fought in a war.