Schrödinger’s What Is Life?

22:55>> Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Cuz every every molecule is different. Every every individual is different. You know, in physics, we have the we have the nice pleasure of being like that electron is the same as every other >> electron in the universe. >> In the universe, we've never found one that's different, right? So, um it it is an incredible experiment that they did back in 1944. Right. Got it. >> At the same time in 1944, you've got >> Irwin Schroinger's book called What is Life? >> This is one of my favorite books of all time. >> Okay. Okay. It's on the FFP readers uh uh uh bestsellers >> 100%. It's it's a very short book. You you can read it in about you can read it

23:36in about 2 hours. Honestly, it's very short. It's just a bunch of lectures that he gave at the Dublin College in Ireland. But it is one of my favorite books of all time because it really shows how a physicist would approach this problem. >> Okay. He was he was influenced by someone but by a bunch of physicists at the time like Max Delbrook who was a physicist that had gone to University of Gingan which we've talked about he was mentored by Lisa Mitner and um then he finally gets to Caltech and he shows that he really starts thinking about how hereditary material must be something that is solid. It must be something that

24:17can resist temperature fluctuations >> and >> because of what we just talked about. >> Yes. And it must also be non-repetitive. >> What does that mean? >> If it's repetitive, >> if it's just a bunch of repetition, you can't store a lot of information there. >> Uh I >> it's got to store a bunch of information, right? It's got to be like this is how you do this and this is how you do that. A recipe book is not repetitive. >> Yeah. Right. Right. every every page or every couple pages is a different >> is different is a different recipe for all of the different things that I need in life. >> Right? This is a it's it's it's quite nice, but it's it's it's a fundamental thing that you can even think about for

24:58a bit and be like, "Yeah, of course." Okay, that makes sense. Whatever the thing that is giving you the information for inheritance has to be something that is not repetitive. It's something that encodes a bunch of information like a recipe book, [clears throat] >> right? Mhm. >> So you could say the you can have multiple books. Books are repetition but within the context of a book. >> Yeah. >> There's complexity within that that like object type. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the key things that he says it's a postulate that he that he puts Irving Schroinger. He says the gene is an aeriodic crystal. What does he mean by that? What he means is there's periodic crystals, right? Diamond is a periodic crystal. It's a bunch of carbon, carbon,

25:40carbon, carbon, carbon. Right? You can have salt, which is sodium chloride, sodium chloride, sodium chloride. Not a lot of information there. There's like two bits of information, which is you put the sodium here and the chlorine here, and then you repeat. And a periodic crystal is somewhere where the atomic arrangements are different. >> Mhm. >> Right. And that difference tells you how to do whatever inheritance thing that you're doing. Right. >> Right. So he was the first person to postulate that there's some kind of hereditary code script. There's some aperiodic crystal inside of biology. >> Mhm. >> That is conferring information to the next generation. >> And this is really important because

26:21this is cited by both Watson and Crick >> who are the who are the discoverers of the double helix. >> They said this was a primary motivation for seeking the genetic structure. what they wanted to do with their life was find this per a periodic crystal. >> So, so just the idea here is that