The Logos Scripture · The Book of Schrödinger

On Why I Dared Write a Book I Did Not Understand

The Book of Schrödinger 4 · 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.

4.1I once wrote a very thin book about living things.
4.2I am not of that trade. My life’s work was in another.
4.3At the beginning I wrote a passage to account for myself. Let me say again what it meant.
4.4To speak about a thing, one ought by rights first to have mastered the whole of it.
4.5But every branch of learning has now grown so large that a man can master only a small piece of one in a lifetime.
4.6And a bad thing follows: there is nobody qualified to put several pieces together and speak.
4.7Yet some questions lie exactly at the joins between pieces. If you will not join them, nobody will ever ask.
4.8So I say: somebody has to take the risk.
4.9The risk looks like this: to make a joining with second-hand and incomplete knowledge, and to be willing to make a fool of oneself.
4.10I put that at the front of the book not out of modesty but to settle the account first.
4.11I want the reader to know: this part I know well, that part I do not; here I am guessing.
4.12When a man crosses onto somebody else’s ground, there is only one defensible way to do it: mark it.
4.13Which sentences you stand firm on, and which you are reaching for — write it plainly.
4.14Then even if you are wrong, others know where to start mending.
4.15There are places in that little book where I was wrong. But those places are marked here I am guessing, so those who came after found them at a glance.
The Logos Scripture →

中文 English 日本語 Español Français Deutsch