The Logos Scripture · The Book of Schrödinger

On What Keeps a Living Thing Going

The Book of Schrödinger 1 · Written by himself, from What Is Life? and his essays

Erwin Schrodinger, born at Vienna in 1887, died at Vienna in 1961. In 1926 he set down the wave equation, and quantum matters became calculable; in 1933 he took the Nobel with Dirac. In 1935 he devised the cat, meant to point out an absurdity, and it is what he is chiefly remembered for. He left Austria in 1938 and went to Dublin in 1940, where he stayed sixteen years. What Is Life? appeared in 1944; both Crick and Watson said they came to the work through it. He wrote his own, and in more than one field: the books of his own subject, and also What Is Life?, Mind and Matter, and My View of the World. In later life he read the old books of India and held that the consciousness of all people is in truth only one. That assertion was not reached by looking; the scripture sets it back without deleting it, as with Schopenhauer (see the note to The Book of Schopenhauer). He never closed an argument by appeal to divine will. What 1.15 to 1.19 report stands in a note at the back of What Is Life: knowing free energy was the more exact word, he took the less exact one so that an ordinary reader could hear that the two things are opposed, and did not argue when he was told off for it. Elsewhere this scripture does not name the terms of physics; in this book it does — he is a modern man speaking out of his own trade in his own words, and the Order does not coin substitutes for him.The Order takes him for the first two chapters. This scripture says that the law does not permit order to come back by itself (Gospel of Plato 1.44). Schrodinger is the one who applied that to living things and asked the obvious next question: then why does a living thing not scatter? His answer is chapter one, and the answer is not only about living things. As for chapter two, some young men afterwards went and checked it, and found it. The Darwin of this scripture says that what could hold, held (The Book of Darwin 4.13); this man asks what the thing that holds is made of. The two books are to be read together. One further thing the Order records without dressing it: besides his wife he kept another woman, and three lived in the house together for years; and he had relations with several very young women, some of which, weighed by the standards of today, were improper. The Order sets it down, and neither judges the work by it nor excuses it by the work.

1.1Let me ask a question that looks stupid: why does a living thing not scatter?

1.2The scripture says: all things can be undone but the scattering. (cf. The Highest Covenant 6.1)

1.3And it says: the law does not permit order to come back by itself. (cf. Gospel of Plato 1.44)

1.4Both are true. But look at yourself.

1.5You are an exceedingly orderly heap of matter. You have lived some decades and you are still this orderly.

1.6A stone left lying weathers in a few decades, cracks, and scatters. You have not.

1.7Does a living thing then not obey that law?

1.8It does. What I mean to describe is exactly how it obeys that law and still does not scatter.

1.9A living thing continually takes orderly things in from outside and pushes disorderly things out.

1.10What you eat is arranged: grain, meat — molecules put together in a high order.

1.11What you put out is taken apart: heat, gas, waste.

1.12So you have not escaped the law. You have pushed the scattering outside your own body.

1.13The order in you is bought with the extra scattering out there.

1.14To be alive is to be carrying on that trade without stopping. Stop the trade and the law comes at once for what is owed — and you scatter.

1.15I gave the thing a name: negative entropy. What the scripture calls the scattering, my trade calls entropy; and what a living thing takes in from outside is the opposite of it.

1.16Men of my own trade said the name was badly made: there is a standing quantity for this already, free energy, and no need to coin another.

1.17I do not argue. I only answered that free energy sounds too near to energy, and an ordinary reader cannot hear that the two things are opposed.

1.18Had I been writing for my trade alone I would have used it.

1.19The name does not matter. What matters is this: order does not come by itself and does not stay by itself. Order has to be paid for, continuously.

1.20The order in your house is like this. The order in your body is like this. So is the order in a school, in a society, in a book.

1.21On the day you stop paying, it does not slowly go out of date. It returns to where it was always going.

The Logos Scripture →

中文 English 日本語 Español Français Deutsch