Can life be explained by physics?

That time, that place

Having fled the Nazis to Ireland, Schrödinger gave a series of public lectures in Dublin. The subject was not physics but life.

Why this question

His question was a physicist's question.

The laws of physics are largely statistical: stable regularities appear only when vast numbers of atoms are involved, and with few atoms the fluctuations swamp everything.

Heredity is different. Something built of relatively few atoms transmits information across centuries with almost no error. How?

What was found

He argued the hereditary material must be crystal-like: atoms locked firmly together, not easily disturbed.

But not like a salt crystal, where the same pattern repeats — a repeating pattern carries no information. Something regular yet non-repeating. He called it an aperiodic crystal, and said the irregular sequence itself is a code.

He raised one more thing. Everything tends toward disorder, and yet life maintains order. Life, he suggested, sustains its own order by drawing order from its surroundings.