The Book Depository What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger
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Price: £14.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: What is Life? : Paperback : Cambridge University Press : 9781107604667 : 1107604664 : 29 Mar 2012 : Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. The Book Depository What is Life by Erwin Schrodinger - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781107604667
MPN: 1107604664
GTIN: 9781107604667
Author: P. brown
Rating: 5
Review: This book is actually magnificent. It's a bit hard to read, i.e. you can't read more than a few pages at a time without losing concentration, but it's not long and is worth it - the guy basically describes DNA 20-odd years prior to its actual discovery from just thinking about it (as in he tells exactly what to look for...). I love it in that it shows the power of reason and logic, unlike what I think of modern 'science' which relies too much on bulk studies without much thought, and doesn't seem to accomplish too much except the publication of semi-conclusive journal papers that no one actually reads.
Author: Nige
Rating: 3
Review: One tends to forget how much has been learned in molecular biology since Schroedinger delivered his 1943 lectures on which the book was based. Therefore, it now seems naive. I bought it because: 1. it was mentioned as a curiosity in a seminar I attended some years ago; 2. it was mentioned by Sir Paul Nurse in a seminar last year; 3. Brian Cox praised it in the 1st of his TV series, 'The Wonders of Life'. As Francis Crick observed, whereas in his new field of neurobiology, 'recent' meant in the last two or three years, in molecular biology it meant the last two or three weeks! Crick also said that a problem was that Schroedinger didn't know any biochemistry, but he said the book had encouraged many subsequently prominent researchers to enter the field. On thing that astonished me was that, in a book published in 1954, also included in this volume, he appeared not to know that 3D vision depended on the different images captured by the two eyes because of their physical lateral separation, only observing, quoting Sherrington, that a distant view looks the same in each eye. Incredible!
