Gem Alert!
I picked up Gustav Eckstein’s book ‘The Body Has A Head’ at a used bookstore in Minneapolis this spring with nothing to go on other than the pretty obvious title. Well, duh. I have a head. The book is far from a collection of obvious statements, although Eckstein has a way of taking the obvious and adding a little more zing to it. Eckstein (not the Marxist, the physician) covers the human body, it’s physiology, it’s development, and it’s destination–the head–first by historical overview, then system by system. The spine of the book is thick, however Dr. Eckstein’s style lies somewhere between jotting down lecture notes and good-humoured prose. I reckon I’ll post more of Eckstein’s vignettes in the future. In the meantime, here he is reviewing What Is Life?
PHYSICIST
“Wherein There Is Life”
To the physicist—what is life?
He may be the lean Princetonian. He may be the MIT engineer. He gazes not so much outward into incredible space as inward into the incredible atom.
Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist, died not long ago, born Austrian, small-bodied, had a roaming imagination, highly cultured, could reflect over the whole area that a good mind reflects over, in mid-life thought once he would change his profession from physics to philosophy, teach physics and think philosophy. He was thirty-nine years old, to be exact. He stumbled, one feels, onto his equation for wave mechanics, became one of the world’s greatest physicists, won a Nobel Prize, for nearly twenty years remained an émigré in Ireland, returned to Vienna to live out what was left, not much. From Dublin where he was teaching at the university he released the manuscript of a short book, What Is Life?, that quickly became a minor classic. It did not require the reader to be a physicist, and he would learn what Schrödinger thought the physicist might contribute to the question.
Electricity, magnetism, gravitation, heat were chapters in our old physics textbooks. Today’s textbooks take up the same themes in the light of later developments, also take regular side-trips into the atom and over the chalkboards is written piously Einstein’s E = mc2.
None of this seems promising as contributing to the question. Schrödinger too thought that the old physics we studied in high school and the Soviets study in kindergarten would not help much. The old was based on statistics. He described situations where the disorder of random movements is given statistical order. Life is not like that. Life draws order from order. One need not be a physicist to see orderliness persisting in families over centuries, as the Hapsburg lip, Hapsburger Lippe, which fascinated Schrödinger as it might anyone who in some museum has stood before the portraits of Velazquez, fearlessly painting those Hapsburgers who marched on parade before him. But, right in our own neighborhood, despite crossbreeding, reckless diluting of wives with husbands, there will bob up in a thirty-second cousin an unmistakable pair of blue eyes.
Schrödinger considered the unit of that old physics to have a pattern that kept repeating, like wallpaper. The unit of the new had no such repeating pattern. It was like a tapestry of Raphael. The chromosome belonged to the new.
Each chromosome—and this now was unexpected—Schrödinger suggested, was an aperiodic crystal. The physicist studies crystals. The aperiodic would be those where the facets do no repeat. (Since the publication of Schrödinger’s book the study with the X ray of crystallized organic molecules has made possible the most important genetic discovery of our time.) Inside that aperiodic crystal would be the genes, that make us what we are, characteristic for characteristic, and by ceaseless duplication keep us what we are, you and I and the kangaroo. Those cocky gene-molecules bequeath our past to our future, predict and produce each member of the President’s cabinet, each player on the Detroit baseball team, each pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales. Each gene-molecule to the physicist is as clear as the tip of Manhattan, though that tip is large and the atom small. Schrödinger asked: Why is an atom so small? He answered: It is because we measure everything in relation to our own body, which is large. He repeated the story of the English King who stretched his arm and established the yard as the distance between his chest and his fingertips. Nowadays we accept that a grouping of atoms joined with other groupings of atoms can produce in nine months a summing-up like Johnny Appleseed.
Schrödinger touched then on evolution. He called our the age of the evolutionary idea, his carefulness placing evolution not in the realm of reality, where of course he thought it was, but in the realm of ideas. The new species resulted not as a selection from among the continuous slight variations always occurring in the living, as Darwin believed, because those slight ones are not inherited, result from quantum jumps. Nature for some still unexplained reason operates in jumps. If quantum does apply to evolution, and it does, that again justifies the physicist trying to help us comprehend the life that is in us, though our passion to comprehend more than we already do, in a bad hour strikes us as pathetic—large comprehending brains but a span of life too short.
Schrödinger does with his vivid writing get into us a picture of a physicist peering at life.
He concludes with entropy. He defines it. He clarifies it. He employs some mathematics, but he never allows it to become too difficult. By the dictionary entropy is the number that expresses the unavailable energy in a thermodynamic system, not an exhilarating definition. What Schrödinger does is emphasize the tendency of all physical systems to go into disorder. Order goes toward disorder. It goes toward what he calls positive entropy. The living is not like that. In the living, order goes to order. Life has absolute order. Life draws order from order. The living creature, or that molecule, that aperiodic crystal, is the most orderly thing on earth. How does the living keep up its order? By feeding on negative entropy, Schrödinger says. And so long as it does it avoids maximum positive entropy, which is death. Sounds like the reasoning of a medieval monk in a black habit and a black hood. The regularly-added can be tea with a slice of cake. The winner of the Nobel Prize suggests just that: the positive entropy that is the cost of living is canceled out by the negative entropy brought in on a dinner plate by the white-coated waiter. Nothing topsy-turvy in preventing death by adding life, though it surprises us that it should be woven into a physicist’s What Is Life? It surprises us also that this is not a romantic science-writer writing the book but a neat-minded mathematically-minded physicist. Schrödinger was above all a poet, able to feel wonder, state wonder. Already in the eighteenth century Marie Francois Xavier Bichat, another poet, came to a similar conclusion, defined life as the sum of the forces that resist death.
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