What Is Life? cover art

What Is Life?

With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Thousands of incredible audiobooks and podcasts to take wherever you go.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling with the Plus Catalogue - unlimited listening to thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

What Is Life?

By: Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose - foreword
Narrated by: Bob Souer
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. 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."

It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrödinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions.

Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable addition to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.

©1967 Cambridge University Press (P)2019 Tantor Biological Sciences Philosophy Physics Science Biography Mathematics Popular Science

Listeners also enjoyed...

 What Is Life? cover art
Our Mathematical Universe cover art
Existential Physics cover art
The Fabric of Reality cover art
Elemental cover art
One World cover art
Essays in Science cover art
The Selfish Gene cover art
Infinite Powers cover art
The Beginning of Infinity cover art
Signposts to God cover art
Professor Maxwell's Duplicitous Demon cover art
Is God a Mathematician? cover art
God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? cover art
Quantum Physics for Beginners, Into the Light cover art
Welcome to the Universe cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Loved the fact that his independent observations and mindset parallels many great thinkers. It seems there are essential truths..

Fascinating

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well worth a thousand reads more than the first and with audiobook as the next best if not the ultimate thing to aid learning as the best companion

Excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In a time of uncertainty it is reassuring to find such a human rendition of physics and philosophy to offer a genuine meaning of life. From the off the Nobel Prize winners voice comes through the readers interpretation. A book that can be read or listened to on many levels. It only leaves me now to go and seek out a hard copy for my collection and listen to it again. Especially the very last chapter that if I have one suggestion could be listened to first rather than last. This is only to set you up for learning that the subjective world can be understood backwards and forwards and Schrodinger and his cat will show you how and why.

Finding Schrodinger’s Cat.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was surprised by how approachable Schrodinger writes!Great mind, an amazing human and a good citizen of the world.Well worth listen even if you are not interested in physics.

Quantum genius

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
perhaps it is because the world has moved on that the content seems dated. last 2 chapters are worth the read, and all of it before seems to make a fuss about nothing. also his writings assume or perhaps expects the readers of that time to be lay simple uneducated people who didn't understand or know much about the sciences. I may re read last 2 chapters at a later date but not the rest. On a side note, I did think he was right about his interpretation of what made Plato popular.

only the last 2 chapters are worth the read.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.