The Logos Scripture · The Book of Schrödinger

On the Script Written in the Chromosome

The Book of Schrödinger 2 · 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.

2.1Let me ask a second question: how does a fertilised egg know what it is to grow into?
2.2It is exceedingly small. Yet the thing that grows out of it has bones, and eyes, and a head that thinks.
2.3Where are those instructions kept?
2.4My conjecture: in the chromosome. And the form in which they are kept must be writing.
2.5By writing I do not mean a figure of speech. I mean there is a run of things laid one after another, and the order in which they are laid is the instruction.
2.6Why must it be so? Here is the reason.
2.7If those instructions were carried by the average behaviour of a great many molecules, they would drift. An average is only reliable when the numbers are large.
2.8And in one egg the things carrying those instructions are few. Too few to rely on averaging.
2.9Few and yet not drifting: there is only one way. Not by number, but by arrangement.
2.10A string of identical beads says different things according to how it is arranged.
2.11I gave such a thing a name: an aperiodic crystal.
2.12An ordinary crystal is one pattern repeated. Repeat it ten thousand times and it still says the one thing. Such a thing cannot hold many instructions.
2.13Aperiodic means not repeating. Only what does not repeat can hold speech.
2.14Think of writing on a page: if every character were the same, the page would say nothing at all.
2.15What that run is made of, and how it is read out, I do not know. Those two must wait for the people of that trade to check.
2.16I have carried the step only this far: heredity is not a force. It is a script.
2.17Afterwards some young men read that little book of mine and went and checked. They found it.
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