What is Life?

by Erwin Schrödinger

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Last annotated on October 15, 2013

(There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.)  Read more at location 174

CHAPTER 1 The Classical Physicist’s Approach to the Subject 

in spite of the variety of topics involved, the whole enterprise is intended to convey one idea only – one small comment on a large and important question.  Read more at location 185

The large and important and very much discussed question is: How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?  Read more at location 188

****  The obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they can be accounted for by those sciences.  Read more at location 191

FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE IN STRUCTURE 

The arrangements of the atoms in the most vital parts of an organism and the interplay of these arrangements differ in a fundamental way from all those arrangements of atoms which physicists and chemists have hitherto made the object of their experimental and theoretical research.  Yet the difference which I have just termed fundamental is of such a kind that it might easily appear slight to anyone except a physicist who is thoroughly imbued with the knowledge that the laws of physics and chemistry are statistical throughout.1 For it is in relation to the statistical point of view that the structure of the vital parts of living organisms differs so entirely from that of any piece of matter that we physicists and chemists have ever handled physically in our laboratories or mentally at our writing desks.  ...And therefore it is small wonder that the organic chemist has already made large and important contributions to the problem of life, whereas the physicist has made next to none.  Read more at location 217

THE NAÏVE PHYSICIST’S APPROACH TO THE SUBJECT 

WHY ARE THE ATOMS SO SMALL? 

****  (Note: Astonishing)  Why are atoms so small? To begin with, they are very small indeed. Every little piece of matter handled in everyday life contains an enormous number of them. Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.  Read more at location 232

Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?  ....Must that be so? Is there an intrinsic reason for it? Can we trace back this state of affairs to some kind of first principle, in order to ascertain and to understand why nothing else is compatible with the very laws of Nature? Now this, for once, is a problem which the physicist is able to clear up completely.  Read more at location 258

THE WORKING OF AN ORGANISM REQUIRES EXACT PHYSICAL LAWS 

On what grounds is the latter task of the said organ incompatible with being, as a whole or in some of its peripheral parts which interact directly with the environment, a mechanism sufficiently refined and sensitive to respond to and register the impact of a single atom from outside? The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness.  Read more at location 273

This has two consequences. First, a physical organization, to be in close correspondence with thought (as my brain is with my thought) must be a very well-ordered organization, and that means that the events that happen within it must obey strict physical laws, at least to a very high degree of accuracy. Secondly, the physical impressions made upon that physically well-organized system by other bodies from outside, obviously correspond to the perception and experience of the corresponding thought, forming its material, as I have called it. Therefore, the physical interactions between our system and others must, as a rule, themselves possess a certain degree of physical orderliness, that is to say, they too must obey strict physical laws to a certain degree of accuracy.  Read more at location 277

PHYSICAL LAWS REST ON ATOMIC STATISTICS AND ARE THEREFORE ONLY APPROXIMATE  

Only in the co-operation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behaviour of these assemblées with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases. It is in that way that the events acquire truly orderly features. All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind;  Read more at location 287

THEIR PRECISION IS BASED ON THE LARGE NUMBER OF ATOMS INTERVENING. FIRST EXAMPLE (PARAMAGNETISM) 

If you fill an oblong quartz tube with oxygen gas and put it into a magnetic field, you find that the gas is magnetized.5 The magnetization is due to the fact that the oxygen molecules are little magnets and tend to orientate themselves parallel to the field, like a compass needle. But you must not think that they actually all turn parallel.  This is a particularly clear example of a purely statistical law. The orientation the field tends to produce is continually counteracted by the heat motion, which works for random orientation. The effect of this striving is, actually, only a small preference for acute over obtuse angles between the dipole axes and the field. Though the single atoms change their orientation incessantly, they produce on the average (owing to their enormous number) a constant small preponderance of orientation in the direction of the field and proportional to it.  Read more at location 305

SECOND EXAMPLE (BROWNIAN MOVEMENT, DIFFUSION) 

If you fill the lower part of a closed glass vessel with fog, consisting of minute droplets, you will find that the upper boundary of the fog gradually sinks, with a well-defined velocity, determined by the viscosity of the air and the size and the specific gravity of the droplets. But if you look at one of the droplets under the microscope you find that it does not permanently sink with constant velocity, but performs a very irregular movement, the so-called Brownian movement, which corresponds to a regular sinking only on the average.  Read more at location 321

A phenomenon very much akin to Brownian movement is that of diffusion: Imagine a vessel filled with a fluid, say water, with a small amount of some coloured substance dissolved in it, say potassium permanganate, not in uniform concentration, but rather as in Fig. 4, where the dots indicate the molecules of the dissolved substance (permanganate) and the concentration diminishes from left to right. If you leave this system alone a very slow process of ‘diffusion’ sets in, the permanganate spreading in the direction from left to right, that is, from the places of higher concentration towards the places of lower concentration, until it is equally distributed through the water. The remarkable thing about this rather simple and apparently not particularly interesting process is that it is in no way due, as one might think, to any tendency or force driving the permanganate molecules away from the crowded region to the less crowded one, like the population of a country spreading to those parts where there is more elbow-room. Nothing of the sort happens with our permanganate molecules. Every one of them behaves quite independently of all the others, which it very seldom meets. ...a plane separating two neighbouring slices will be crossed by more molecules coming from the left than in the opposite direction, simply because to the left there are more molecules engaged in random walk than there are to the right. And as long as that is so the balance will show up as a regular flow from left to right, until a uniform distribution is reached. When these considerations are translated into mathematical language the exact law of diffusion is reached in the form of a partial differential equation.  The reason for mentioning the stern ‘mathematically exact’ law here, is to emphasize that its physical exactitude must nevertheless be challenged in every particular application. Being based on pure chance, its validity is only approximate. If it is, as a rule, a very good approximation, that is only due to the enormous number of molecules that co-operate in the phenomenon. The smaller their number, the larger the quite haphazard deviations we must expect – and they can be observed under favourable circumstances.  Read more at location 362

THIRD EXAMPLE (LIMITS OF ACCURACY OF MEASURING) 

The uncontrollable effect of the heat motion competes with the effect of the force to be measured and makes the single deflection observed insignificant. You have to multiply observations, in order to eliminate the effect of the Brownian movement of your instrument. This example is, I think, particularly illuminating in our present investigation. For our organs of sense, after all, are a kind of instrument. We can see how useless they would be if they became too sensitive.  Read more at location 375

THE √n RULE 

I should like to add one very important quantitative statement concerning the degree of inaccuracy to be expected in any physical law, the so-called √n law.  Read more at location 382

If I tell you that a certain gas under certain conditions of pressure and temperature has a certain density, and if I expressed this by saying that within a certain volume (of a size relevant for some experiment) there are under these conditions just n molecules of the gas, then you might be sure that if you could test my statement in a particular moment of time, you would find it inaccurate, the departure being of the order of √n. Hence if the number n = 100, you would find a departure of about 10, thus relative error = 10%. But if n = 1 million, you would be likely to find a departure of about 1,000, thus relative error = . Now, roughly speaking, this statistical law is quite general. The laws of physics and physical chemistry are inaccurate within a probable relative error of the order of 1/√n, where n is the number of molecules that co-operate to bring about that law – to produce its validity within such regions of space or time (or both) that matter, for some considerations or for some particular experiment.  Read more at location 384

****  You see from this again that an organism must have a comparatively gross structure in order to enjoy the benefit of fairly accurate laws, both for its internal life and for its interplay with the external world. For otherwise the number of co-operating particles would be too small, the ‘law’ too inaccurate.  Read more at location 392

CHAPTER 2 The Hereditary Mechanism 

Thus we have come to the conclusion that an organism and all the biologically relevant processes that it experiences must have an extremely ‘many-atomic’ structure and must be safeguarded against haphazard, ‘single-atomic’ events attaining too great importance. That, the ‘naïve physicist’ tells us, is essential, so that the organism may, so to speak, have sufficiently accurate physical laws on which to draw for setting up its marvellously regular and well-ordered working.  Read more at location 420

As we shall presently see, incredibly small groups of atoms, much too small to display exact statistical laws, do play a dominating role in the very orderly and lawful events within a living organism. They have control of the observable large-scale features which the organism acquires in the course of its development, they determine important characteristics of its functioning; and in all this very sharp and very strict biological laws are displayed.  Read more at location 433

THE HEREDITARY CODE-SCRIPT (CHROMOSOMES) 

Let me use the word ‘pattern’ of an organism in the sense in which the biologist calls it ‘the four-dimensional pattern’, meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself. Now, this whole four-dimensional pattern is known to be determined by the structure of that one cell, the fertilized egg. Moreover, we know that it is essentially determined by the structure of only a small part of that cell, its nucleus. This nucleus, in the ordinary ‘resting state’ of the cell, usually appears as a network of chromatine,2 distributed over the cell. But in the vitally important processes of cell division (mitosis and meiosis, see below) it is seen to consist of a set of particles, usually fibre-shaped or rod-like, called the chromosomes, which number 8 or 12 or, in man, 48. But I ought really to have written these illustrative numbers as 2 × 4, 2 × 6, …, 2 × 24, …, and I ought to have spoken of two sets, in order to use the expression in the customary meaning of the biologist. For though the single chromosomes are sometimes clearly distinguished and individualized by shape and size, the two sets are almost entirely alike. As we shall see in a moment, one set comes from the mother (egg cell), one from the father (fertilizing spermatozoon). It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state. Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code; so there are, as a rule, two copies of the latter in the fertilized egg cell, which forms the earliest stage of the future individual.  Read more at location 443

GROWTH OF THE BODY BY CELL DIVISION (MITOSIS) 

The growth of an organism is effected by consecutive cell divisions. Such a cell division is called mitosis. It is, in the life of a cell, not such a very frequent event as one might expect, considering the enormous number of cells of which our body is composed. In the beginning the growth is rapid. The egg divides into two ‘daughter cells’ which, at the next step, will produce a generation of four, then of 8, 16, 32, 64, …, etc.  But from their rapid increase we infer by an easy computation that on the average as few as 50 or 60 successive divisions suffice to produce the number of cells4 in a grown man – or, say, ten times the number,2 taking into account the exchange of cells during lifetime. Thus, a body cell of mine is, on the average, only the 50th or 60th ‘descendant’ of the egg that was I.  Read more at location 471

IN MITOSIS EVERY CHROMOSOME IS DUPLICATED 

How do the chromosomes behave on mitosis? They duplicate – both sets, both copies of the code, duplicate. The process has been intensively studied under the microscope and is of paramount interest, but much too involved to describe here in detail. The salient point is that each of the two ‘daughter cells’ gets a dowry of two further complete sets of chromosomes exactly similar to those of the parent cell.  ...it must be in some way very relevant to the functioning of the organism, that every single cell, even a less important one, should be in possession of a complete (double) copy of the code-script.  ...The most surprising fact is the doubleness of the chromosome set, maintained throughout the mitotic divisions. That it is the outstanding feature of the genetic mechanism is most strikingly revealed by the one and only departure from the rule, which we have now to discuss.  Read more at location 485

REDUCTIVE DIVISION (MEIOSIS) AND FERTILIZATION (SYNGAMY) 

In meiosis the double chromosome set of the parent cell simply separates into two single sets, one of which goes to each of the two daughter cells, the gametes. In other words, the mitotic doubling of the number of chromosomes does not take place in meiosis, the number remains constant and thus every gamete receives only half– that is, only one complete copy of the code, not two,  ...Thus the gametes are haploid, the ordinary body cells diploid  Read more at location 498

HAPLOID INDIVIDUALS 

it is of real interest, since it shows that actually a fairly complete code-script of the ‘pattern’ is contained in every single set of chromosomes.  Read more at location 504

THE OUTSTANDING RELEVANCE OF THE REDUCTIVE DIVISION 

The important, the really fateful event in the process of reproduction of the individual is not fertilization but meiosis. One set of chromosomes is from the father, one from the mother.  ...Let me fix attention on my paternal set of chromosomes, in particular on one of them, say No. 5. It is a faithful replica either of the No. 5 my father received from his father or of the No. 5 he had received from his mother. The issue was decided by a 50:50 chance in the meiosis taking place in my father’s body in November 1886 and producing the spermatozoon which a few days later was to be effective in begetting me. Exactly the same story could be repeated about chromosomes Nos. 1, 2, 3, …, 24 of my paternal set, and mutatis mutandis about every one of my maternal chromosomes. Moreover, all the 48 issues are entirely independent.  Read more at location 525

CROSSING-OVER. LOCATION OF PROPERTIES 

Before being separated in the reductive division, say the one in the father’s body, any two ‘homologous’ chromosomes come into close contact with each other, during which they sometimes exchange entire portions in the way illustrated in Fig. 6. By this process, called ‘crossing-over’, two properties situated in the respective parts of that chromosome will be separated in the grandchild,  Read more at location 535

If there were no crossing-over, two properties for which the same chromosome is responsible would always be passed on together, no descendant receiving one of them without receiving the other as well; but two properties, due to different chromosomes, would either stand a 50:50 chance of being separated or they would invariably be separated – the latter when they were situated in homologous chromosomes of the same ancestor, which could never go together. These rules and chances are interfered with by crossing-over. Hence the probability of this event can be ascertained by registering carefully the percentage composition of the offspring in extended breeding experiments,  Read more at location 544

Difference of property, to my view, is really the fundamental concept rather than property itself, notwithstanding the apparent linguistic and logical contradiction of this statement. The differences of properties actually are discrete,  Read more at location 565

MAXIMUM SIZE OF A GENE 

We have just introduced the term gene for the hypothetical material carrier of a definite hereditary feature. We must now stress two points which will be highly relevant to our investigation. The first is the size –  As regards the size, there are two entirely independent estimates, one resting on genetic evidence (breeding experiments), the other on cytological evidence (direct microscopic inspection).  ...it is clear that our estimate can only give a maximum size, because the number of features isolated by genetic analysis is continually increasing as work goes on. The other estimate, though based on microscopic inspection, is really far less direct. Certain cells of Drosophila (namely, those of its salivary glands) are, for some reason, enormously enlarged, and so are their chromosomes.  ...Dividing the length of the chromosome, measured in a normal-sized cell by their number (2,000), he finds the volume of a gene equal to a cube of edge 300 Å. Considering the roughness of the estimates, we may regard this to be also the size obtained by the first method.  Read more at location 583

SMALL NUMBERS 

****  300 Å is only about 100 or 150 atomic distances in a liquid or in a solid, so that a gene contains certainly not more than about a million or a few million atoms. That number is much too small (from the √n point of view) to entail an orderly and lawful behaviour according to statistical physics  Read more at location 588

PERMANENCE 

Let us now turn to the second highly relevant question: What degree of permanence do we encounter in hereditary properties and what must we therefore attribute to the material structures which carry them?  ...it is the whole (four-dimensional) pattern of the ‘phenotype’, the visible and manifest nature of the individual, which is reproduced without appreciable change for generations, permanent within centuries – though not within tens of thousands of years – and borne at each transmission by the material structure of the nuclei of the two cells which unite to form the fertilized egg cell. That is a marvel – than which only one is greater; one that, if intimately connected with it, yet lies on a different plane. I mean the fact that we, whose total being is entirely based on a marvellous interplay of this very kind, yet possess the power of acquiring considerable knowledge about it. I think it possible that this knowledge may advance to little short of a complete understanding – of the first marvel. The second may well be beyond human understanding.  Read more at location 600

CHAPTER 3 Mutations 

‘JUMP-LIKE’ MUTATIONS – THE WORKING - GROUND OF NATURAL SELECTION

the common saying that exceptions prove the rule is actually true. If there were no exceptions to the likeness between children and parents, we should have been deprived not only of all those beautiful experiments which have revealed to us the detailed mechanism of heredity, but also of that grand, million-fold experiment of Nature, which forges the species by natural selection and survival of the fittest.  ..We know definitely, today, that Darwin was mistaken in regarding the small, continuous, accidental variations, that are bound to occur even in the most homogeneous population, as the material on which natural selection works. For it has been proved that they are not inherited.  ...The fact is important enough to be illustrated briefly.  ...pick out a group of ears (as indicated by blackening) with awns noticeably beyond the average, but sufficient in number to be sown in a field by themselves and give a new crop. In making the same statistics for this, Darwin would have expected to find the corresponding curve shifted to the right. In other words, he would have expected to produce by selection an increase of the average length of the awns. That is not the case, if a truly pure-bred strain of barley has been used. The new statistical curve, obtained from the selected crop, is identical with the first one, and the same would be the case if ears with particularly short awns had been selected for seed. Selection has no effect – because the small, continuous variations are not inherited. They are obviously not based on the structure of the hereditary substance, they are accidental. But about forty years ago the Dutchman de Vries discovered that in the offspring even of thoroughly pure-bred stocks, a very small number of individuals, say two or three in tens of thousands, turn up with small but ‘jump-like’ changes, the expression ‘jump-like’ not meaning that the change is so very considerable, but that there is a discontinuity inasmuch as there are no intermediate forms between the unchanged and the few changed. De Vries called that a mutation.  Read more at location 633

The significant fact is the discontinuity. It reminds a physicist of quantum theory – no intermediate energies occurring between two neighbouring energy levels. He would be inclined to call de Vries’s mutation theory, figuratively, the quantum theory of biology. We shall see later that this is much more than figurative. The mutations are actually due to quantum jumps in the gene molecule.  Read more at location 642

THEY BREED TRUE, THAT IS, THEY ARE PERFECTLY INHERITED 

Mutations are inherited as perfectly as the original, unchanged characters were.  ...a mutation is definitely a change in the hereditary treasure and has to be accounted for by some change in the hereditary substance.  In Darwin’s theory, you just have to substitute ‘mutations’ for his ‘slight accidental variations’ (just as quantum theory substitutes ‘quantum jump’ for ‘continuous transfer of energy’).  Read more at location 659

LOCALIZATION. RECESSIVITY AND DOMINANCE 

We should expect a definite observed mutation to be caused by a change in a definite region in one of the chromosomes. And so it is. It is important to state that we know definitely that it is a change in one chromosome only, but not in the corresponding locus’ of the homologous chromosome.  ...The fact that only one chromosome is affected is revealed when the mutated individual (often called ‘mutant’) is crossed with a non-mutated one. For exactly half of the offspring exhibit the mutant character and half the normal one. That is what is to be expected as a consequence of the separation of the two chromosomes on meiosis in the mutant  Read more at location 670

mutations are very often latent. What does that mean? In the mutant the two ‘copies of the code-script’ are no longer identical; they present two different ‘readings’ or versions’, at any rate in that one place. Perhaps it is well to point out at once that, while it might be tempting, it would nevertheless be entirely wrong to regard the original version as ‘orthodox’, and the mutant version as ‘heretic’. We have to regard them, in principle, as being of equal right – for the normal characters have also arisen from mutations.  Read more at location 680

What actually happens is that the ‘pattern’ of the individual, as a general rule, follows either the one or the other version, which may be the normal or the mutant one. The version which is followed is called dominant, the other recessive; in other words, the mutation is called dominant or recessive, according to whether it is immediately effective in changing the pattern or not. Recessive mutations are even more frequent than dominant ones and are very important, though at first they do not show up at all.  Read more at location 688

INTRODUCING SOME TECHNICAL LANGUAGE 

I think it will make for clarity to explain here a few technical terms. For what I called ‘version of the code-script’ – be it the original one or a mutant one – the term ‘allele’ has been adopted. When the versions are different, as indicated in Fig. 8, the individual is called heterozygous, with respect to that locus. When they are equal, as in the non-mutated individual or in the case of Fig. 10, they are called homozygous. Thus a recessive allele influences the pattern only when homozygous, whereas a dominant allele produces the same pattern, whether homozygous or only heterozygous.  Read more at location 697

GENERAL AND HISTORICAL REMARKS 

The fact that the recessive allele, when heterozygous, is completely overpowered by the dominant and produces no visible effect at all, is amazing. It ought at least to be mentioned that there are exceptions to this behaviour.  Read more at location 735

The backbone of the theory, the law of inheritance, to successive generations, of properties in which the parents differ, and more especially the important distinction recessive-dominant, are due to the now world-famous Augustinian Abbot Gregor Mendel (1822–84). Mendel knew nothing about mutations and chromosomes.  Read more at location 741

THE NECESSITY OF MUTATION BEING A RARE EVENT 

In order to be suitable material for the work of natural selection, mutations must be rare events, as they actually are. If they were so frequent that there was a considerable chance of, say, a dozen of different mutations occurring in the same individual, the injurious ones would, as a rule, predominate over the advantageous ones and the species, instead of being improved by selection, would remain unimproved, or would perish. The comparative conservatism which results from the high degree of permanence of the genes is essential.  Read more at location 754

FIRST LAW. MUTATION IS A SINGLE EVENT 

(1) The increase is exactly proportional to the dosage of rays, so that one can actually speak [as I did] of a coefficient of increase.  Read more at location 778

Mutation is thus not an accumulated effect, brought about by consecutive small portions of radiation reinforcing each other. It must consist in some single event occurring in one chromosome during irradiation. What kind of event?  Read more at location 785

SECOND LAW. LOCALIZATION OF THE EVENT 

(2) If you vary the quality of the rays (wave-length) within wide limits, from soft X-rays to fairly hard γ-rays, the coefficient remains constant, provided you give the same dosage in so-called r-units, that is to say, provided you measure the dosage by the total amount of ions produced per unit volume in a suitably chosen standard substance during the time and at the place where the parents are exposed to the rays.  Read more at location 788

The simplest interpretation of this result is that there is a fair chance of producing that mutation when an ionization (or excitation) occurs not more than about ‘10 atoms away’ from some particular spot in the chromosome.  Read more at location 805

CHAPTER 4 The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence 

PERMANENCE UNEXPLAINABLE BY CLASSICAL PHYSICS 

How can we, from the point of view of statistical physics, reconcile the facts that the gene structure seems to involve only a comparatively small number of atoms (of the order of 1,000 and possibly much less), and that nevertheless it displays a most regular and lawful activity – with a durability or permanence that borders upon the miraculous?  Read more at location 833

the number of atoms involved in the responsible gene structure is likely to be of the same order of magnitude as in the cases tested by X-rays. The gene has been kept at a temperature around 98°F during all that time. How are we to understand that it has remained unperturbed by the disordering tendency of the heat motion for centuries?  Read more at location 842

EXPLICABLE BY QUANTUM THEORY 

the mechanism of heredity is closely related to, nay, founded on, the very basis of quantum theory. This theory was discovered by Max Planck in 1900. Modern genetics can be dated from the rediscovery of Mendel’s paper by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak (1900) and from de Vries’s paper on mutations (1901–3). Thus the births of the two great theories nearly coincide, and it is small wonder that both of them had to reach a certain maturity before the connection could emerge. On the side of quantum theory it took more than a quarter of a century till in 1926–7 the quantum theory of the chemical bond was outlined in its general principles by W. Heitler and F. London. The Heitler–London theory involves the most subtle and intricate conceptions of the latest development of quantum theory (called ‘quantum mechanics’ or ‘wave mechanics’).  Read more at location 853

QUANTUM THEORY – DISCRETE STATES – QUANTUM JUMPS 

The great revelation of quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.  Read more at location 864

MOLECULES 

The point to stress here is, that the molecule will of necessity have a certain stability; the configuration cannot change, unless at least the energy difference, necessary to ‘lift’ it to the next higher level,  Read more at location 886

THEIR STABILITY DEPENDENT ON TEMPERATURE 

the ‘time of expectation’ largely depends on the ratio of two energies, one being just the energy difference itself that is required to effect the lift (let us write W for it), the other one characterizing the intensity of the heat motion at the temperature in question (let us write T for the absolute temperature and kT for the characteristic energy).  ...What is amazing is how enormously the time of expectation depends on comparatively small changes of the ratio W:kT.  Read more at location 908

MATHEMATICAL INTERLUDE 

Let us start from the empirical facts. It is known to the chemist that the same group of atoms can unite in more than one way to form a molecule. Such molecules are called isomeric (‘consisting of the same parts’; = same, = part). Isomerism is not an exception, it is the rule. The larger the molecule, the more isomeric alternatives are offered.  Read more at location 946

two configurations are not neighbouring configurations. The transition from one to the other can only take place over intermediate configurations which have a greater energy than either of them.  ...The ‘quantum jump’ which we mean is the transition from one relatively stable molecular configuration to another. The energy supply required for the transition (the quantity denoted by W) is not the actual level difference, but the step from the initial level up to the threshold  Read more at location 965

CHAPTER 5 Delbrück’s Model Discussed and Tested 

THE GENERAL PICTURE OF THE HEREDITARY SUBSTANCE 

From these facts emerges a very simple answer to our question, namely: Are these structures, composed of comparatively few atoms, capable of withstanding for long periods the disturbing influence of heat motion to which the hereditary substance is continually exposed? We shall assume the structure of a gene to be that of a huge molecule, capable only of discontinuous change, which consists in a rearrangement of the atoms and leads to an isomeric2 molecule. The rearrangement may affect only a small region of the gene, and a vast number of different rearrangements may be possible. The energy thresholds, separating the actual configuration from any possible isomeric ones, have to be high enough (compared with the average heat energy of an atom) to make the change-over a rare event. These rare events we shall identify with spontaneous mutations.  Read more at location 988

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE PICTURE 

Quantum mechanics is the first theoretical aspect which accounts from first principles for all kinds of aggregates of atoms actually encountered in Nature.  Read more at location 1005

SOME TRADITIONAL MISCONCEPTIONS 

Are there really no other endurable structures composed of atoms except molecules?  Read more at location 1013

The cases of a molecule, a solid, a crystal are not really different. In the light of present knowledge they are virtually the same.  Read more at location 1018

DIFFERENT ‘STATES’ OF MATTER 

the true aspect of the structure of matter the limits must be drawn in an entirely different way. The fundamental distinction is between the two lines of the following scheme of ‘equations’:   molecule = solid = crystal. gas   = liquid = amorphous.  Read more at location 1034

Where we find no crystalline structure we have to regard the thing as a liquid with very high ‘viscosity’  Read more at location 1040

The continuity of the gaseous and liquid state is a well-known story. You can liquefy any gas without discontinuity by taking your way ‘around’ the so-called critical point.  Read more at location 1045

THE DISTINCTION THAT REALLY MATTERS 

the main point, namely, that we wish a molecule to be regarded as a solid = crystal.  Read more at location 1049

The reason for this is that the atoms forming a molecule, whether there be few or many of them, are united by forces of exactly the same nature as the numerous atoms which build up a true solid, a crystal. The molecule presents the same solidity of structure as a crystal. Remember that it is precisely this solidity on which we draw to account for the permanence of the gene!  Read more at location 1050

****  The distinction that is really important in the structure of matter is whether atoms are bound together by those ‘solidifying’ Heitler–London forces or whether they are not. In a solid and in a molecule they all are. In a gas of single atoms (as e.g. mercury vapour) they are not. In a gas composed of molecules, only the atoms within every molecule are linked in this way.  Read more at location 1052

THE APERIODIC SOLID 

A small molecule might be called ‘the germ of a solid’. Starting from such a small solid germ, there seem to be two different ways of building up larger and larger associations. One is the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure in three directions again and again. That is the way followed in a growing crystal. Once the periodicity is established, there is no definite limit to the size of the aggregate. The other way is that of building up a more and more extended aggregate without the dull device of repetition. That is the case of the more and more complicated organic molecule in which every atom, and every group of atoms, plays an individual role, not entirely equivalent to that of many others  ...(as is the case in a periodic structure). We might quite properly call that an aperiodic crystal or solid and express our hypothesis by saying: We believe a gene – or perhaps the whole chromosome fibre3 – to be an aperiodic solid.  Read more at location 1061

THE VARIETY OF CONTENTS COMPRESSED IN THE MINIATURE CODE 

It has often been asked how this tiny speck of material, the nucleus of the fertilized egg, could contain an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organism. A well-ordered association of atoms, endowed with sufficient resistivity to keep its order permanently, appears to be the only conceivable material structure that offers a variety of possible (‘isomeric’) arrangements, sufficiently large to embody a complicated system of ‘determinations’ within a small spatial boundary. Indeed, the number of atoms in such a structure need not be very large to produce an almost unlimited number of possible arrangements.  Read more at location 1065

COMPARISON WITH FACTS: DEGREE OF STABILITY; DISCONTINUITY OF MUTATIONS 

isomeric change of configuration in some part of our molecule, produced by a chance fluctuation of the vibrational energy, can actually be a sufficiently rare event to be interpreted as a spontaneous mutation. Thus we account, by the very principles of quantum mechanics, for the most amazing fact about mutations, the fact by which they first attracted de Vries’s attention, namely, that they are ‘jumping’ variations, no intermediate forms occurring.  Read more at location 1100

STABILITY OF NATURALLY SELECTED GENES 

CHAPTER 6 Order, Disorder and Entropy  Read more at location 1164

A REMARKABLE GENERAL CONCLUSION FROM THE MODEL 

ORDER BASED ON ORDER 

It has been explained in chapter 1 that the laws of physics, as we know them, are statistical laws.2 They have a lot to do with the natural tendency of things to go over into disorder. But, to reconcile the high durability of the hereditary substance with its minute size, we had to evade the tendency to disorder by ‘inventing the molecule’, in fact, an unusually large molecule which has to be a masterpiece of highly differentiated order, safeguarded by the conjuring rod of quantum theory. The laws of chance are not invalidated by this ‘invention’, but their outcome is modified. The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by quantum theory, especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up.  Read more at location 1184

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM 

What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on ‘doing something’, moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances. When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so, temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly.  Read more at location 1201

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva, entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the organism, and in some quarters is still claimed. How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material. (E.g. the German for metabolism is Stoffwechsel.) That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd. Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, etc., is as good as any other of its kind; what could be gained by exchanging them? For a while in the past our curiosity was silenced by being told that we feed upon energy.  ...Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.  Read more at location 1229

WHAT IS ENTROPY? 

What is entropy? Let me first emphasize that it is not a hazy concept or idea, but a measurable physical quantity just like the length of a rod, the temperature at any point of a body, the heat of fusion of a given crystal or the specific heat of any given substance. At the absolute zero point of temperature (roughly – 273°C) the entropy of any substance is zero. When you bring the substance into any other state by slow, reversible little steps (even if thereby the substance changes its physical or chemical nature or splits up into two or more parts of different physical or chemical nature) the entropy increases by an amount which is computed by dividing every little portion of heat you had to supply in that procedure by the absolute temperature at which it was supplied – and by summing up all these small contributions.  Read more at location 1235

ORGANIZATION MAINTAINED BY EXTRACTING ‘ORDER’ FROM THE ENVIRONMENT 

We said before: ‘It feeds upon negative entropy’, attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level. If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal, I/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order.  ...Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment. This conclusion is less paradoxical than it appears at first sight. Rather could it be blamed for triviality. Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form  Read more at location 1271

NOTE TO CHAPTER 6

The remarks on negative entropy have met with doubt and opposition from physicist colleagues. Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead.  Read more at location 1277

CHAPTER 7 Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics? 

REVIEWING THE BIOLOGICAL SITUATION 

****  The unfolding of events in the life cycle of an organism exhibits an admirable regularity and orderliness, unrivalled by anything we meet with in inanimate matter. We find it controlled by a supremely well-ordered group of atoms, which represent only a very small fraction of the sum total in every cell. Moreover, from the view we have formed of the mechanism of mutation we conclude that the dislocation of just a few atoms within the group of ‘governing atoms’ of the germ cell suffices to bring about a well-defined change in the large-scale hereditary characteristics of the organism. These facts are easily the most interesting that science has revealed in our day.  Read more at location 1320

An organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the ‘aperiodic solids’, the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of – much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal – in virtue of the individual role every atom and every radical is playing here.  Read more at location 1325

SUMMARIZING THE PHYSICAL SITUATION 

Contrary to the common belief, the regular course of events, governed by the laws of physics, is never the consequence of one well-ordered configuration of atoms – not unless that configuration of atoms repeats itself a great number of times, either as in the periodic crystal or as in a liquid or in a gas composed of a great number of identical molecules.  ...It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.  Read more at location 1342

THE STRIKING CONTRAST 

****  In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation. A single group of atoms existing only in one copy produces orderly events, marvellously tuned in with each other and with the environment according to most subtle laws. I said, existing only in one copy, for after all we have the example of the egg and of the unicellular organism. In the following stages of a higher organism the copies are multiplied, that is true. But to what extent? Something like 1014 in a grown mammal, I understand. What is that! Only a millionth of the number of molecules in one cubic inch of air. Though comparatively bulky, by coalescing they would form but a tiny drop of liquid. And look at the way they are actually distributed. Every cell harbours just one of them (or two, if we bear in mind diploidy). Since we know the power this tiny central office has in the isolated cell, do they not resemble stations of local government dispersed through the body, communicating with each other with great ease, thanks to the code that is common to all of them?  Read more at location 1352

****  it needs no poetical imagination but only clear and sober scientific reflection to recognize that we are here obviously faced with events whose regular and lawful unfolding is guided by a ‘mechanism’ entirely different from the ‘probability mechanism’ of physics. For it is simply a fact of observation that the guiding principle in every cell is embodied in a single atomic association existing only in one copy (or sometimes two) – and a fact of observation that it results in producing events which are a paragon of orderliness. Whether we find it astonishing or whether we find it quite plausible that a small but highly organized group of atoms be capable of acting in this manner, the situation is unprecedented, it is unknown anywhere else except in living matter.  Read more at location 1360

TWO WAYS OF PRODUCING ORDERLINESS 

It appears that there are two different ‘mechanisms’ by which orderly events can be produced: the ‘statistical mechanism’ which produces ‘order from disorder’ and the new one, producing ‘order from order’  Read more at location 1371

THE NEW PRINCIPLE IS NOT ALIEN TO PHYSICS 

In short, all purely mechanical events seem to follow distinctly and directly the ‘order-from-order’ principle. And if we say ‘mechanical’, the term must be taken in a wide sense.  Read more at location 1393

Let us analyse the motion of a real clock accurately. It is not at all a purely mechanical phenomenon. A purely mechanical clock would need no spring, no winding. Once set in motion, it would go on for ever. A real clock without a spring stops after a few beats of the pendulum, its mechanical energy is turned into heat. This is an infinitely complicated atomistic process.  Read more at location 1406

Clockworks made of real physical matter (in contrast to imagination) are not true ‘clock-works’. The element of chance may be more or less reduced, the likelihood of the clock suddenly going altogether wrong may be infinitesimal, but it always remains in the background. Even in the motion of the celestial bodies irreversible frictional and thermal influences are not wanting. Thus the rotation of the earth is slowly diminished by tidal friction, and along with this reduction the moon gradually recedes from the earth, which, would not happen if the earth were a completely rigid rotating sphere. Nevertheless the fact remains that ‘physical clock-works’ visibly display very prominent ‘order-from-order’ features – the type that aroused the physicist’s excitement when he encountered them in the organism.  Read more at location 1425

NERNST’S THEOREM 

When does a physical system – any kind of association of atoms – display ‘dynamical law’ (in Planck’s meaning) or ‘clock-work features’? Quantum theory has a very short answer to this question, viz. at the absolute zero of temperature. As zero temperature is approached the molecular disorder ceases to have any bearing on physical events. This fact was, by the way, not discovered by theory, but by carefully investigating chemical reactions over a wide range of temperatures and extrapolating the results to zero temperature – which cannot actually be reached. This is Walther Nernst’s famous ‘Heat Theorem’, which is sometimes, and not unduly, given the proud name of the ‘Third Law of Thermodynamics’ (the first being the energy principle, the second the entropy principle).  Read more at location 1434

Clockworks are capable of functioning ‘dynamically’, because they are built of solids, which are kept in shape by London–Heitler forces, strong enough to elude the disorderly tendency of heat motion at ordinary temperature. Now, I think, few words more are needed to disclose the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism. It is simply and solely that the latter also hinges upon a solid – the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion.  Read more at location 1450

The most striking features are: first, the curious distribution of the cogs in a many-celled organism, for which I may refer to the somewhat poetical description on p. 79; and secondly, the fact that the single cog is not of coarse human make, but is the finest masterpiece ever achieved along the lines of the Lord’s quantum mechanics.  Read more at location 1458

EPILOGUE On Determinism and Free Will 

According to the evidence put forward in the preceding pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions, are (considering also their complex structure and the accepted statistical explanation of physico-chemistry) if not strictly deterministic at any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters, quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically relevant role in them,  Read more at location 1466

(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ – am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.  ...In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.  Read more at location 1483

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world.  Read more at location 1485

****  (Note: perennial philosophy)  Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).  Read more at location 1490

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Even in the pathological cases of split consciousness or double personality the two persons alternate, they are never manifest simultaneously.  Read more at location 1496

does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, as puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever, intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now, there is a great plurality of similar bodies.  Read more at location 1500

It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful, while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the facts upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls. Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds.  ...Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naïve idea of plurality of souls, but ‘remedy’ it by declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies?  Read more at location 1509

****  The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA);  Read more at location 1511

it has been said that there is a tree there outside my window but I do not really see the tree. By some cunning device of which only the initial, relatively simple steps are explored, the real tree throws an image of itself into my consciousness, and that is what I perceive. If you stand by my side and look at the same tree, the latter manages to throw an image into your soul as well. I see my tree and you see yours (remarkably like mine), and what the tree in itself is we do not know. For this extravagance Kant is responsible. In the order of ideas which regards consciousness as a singulare tantum it is conveniently replaced by the statement that there is obviously only one tree and all the image business is a ghost-story. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as ‘I’ What is this ‘I’? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected.  ... ‘The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.  Read more at location 1528

(Note: **** Hilarious!!  I was thinking just that, and am actually reading 'The Perennial Philosophy' right now!)  The point of view taken here levels with what Aldous Huxley has recently – and very appropriately – called The Perennial Philosophy. His beautiful book (London, Chatto and Windus, 1946) is singularly fit to explain not only the state of affairs, but also why it is so difficult to grasp and so liable to meet with opposition.  Read more at location 1533

MIND AND MATTER

The Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1956 

CHAPTER 1 The Physical Basis of Consciousness 

THE PROBLEM 

*****  The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simpler: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?  Read more at location 1543

the turning-up of nerve cells and brains within certain strains of organisms is a very special event whose meaning and significance is quite well understood. It is a special kind of mechanism by which the individual responds to alternative situations by accordingly alternating behaviour, a mechanism for adaptation to a changing surrounding. It is the most elaborate and the most ingenious among all such mechanisms, and wherever it turns up it rapidly gains a dominating role. However, it is not sui generis. Large groups of organisms, in particular the plants, achieve very similar performances in an entirely different fashion. Are we prepared to believe that this very special turn in the development of the higher animals, a turn that might after all have failed to appear, was a necessary condition for the world to flash up to itself in the light of consciousness?  Read more at location 1555

According to Spinoza every particular thing or being is a modification of the infinite substance, i.e. of God. It expresses itself by each of his attributes, in particular that of extension and that of thought. The first is its bodily existence in space and time, the second is – in the case of a living man or animal – his mind. But to Spinoza any inanimate bodily thing is at the same time also ‘a thought of God’, that is, it exists in the second attribute as well. We encounter here the bold thought of universal animation, though not for the first time,  Read more at location 1564

A TENTATIVE ANSWER 

Not every nervous process, nay by no means every cerebral process, is accompanied by consciousness. Many of them are not, even though physiologically and biologically they are very much like the ‘conscious’ ones,  Read more at location 1574

many reflexive processes exist that do pass through the brain, yet do not fall into consciousness at all or have very nearly ceased to do so. For in the latter case the distinction is not sharp; intermediate degrees between fully conscious and completely unconscious occur.  Read more at location 1578

(Note: Since proven via research, e.g. "Power of Habit")  Any succession of events in which we take part with sensations, perceptions and possibly with actions gradually drops out of the domain of consciousness when the same string of events repeats itself in the same way very often. But it is immediately shot up into the conscious region, if at such a repetition either the occasion or the environmental conditions met with on its pursuit differ from what they were on all the previous incidences.  Read more at location 1582

A single experience that is never to repeat itself is biologically irrelevant. Biological value lies only in learning the suitable reaction to a situation that offers itself again and again, in many cases periodically, and always requires the same response if the organism is to hold its ground.  Read more at location 1590

(Note: more on habit)  On frequent repetition the whole string of events becomes more and more of a routine, it becomes more and more uninteresting, the responses become ever more reliable according as they fade from consciousness.  Read more at location 1594

(Note: the essence of habit)  Now in this fashion differentials, variants of response, bifurcations, etc., are piled up one upon the other in unsurveyable abundance, but only the most recent ones remain in the domain of consciousness, only those with regard to which the living substance is still in the stage of learning or practising. One might say, metaphorically, that consciousness is the tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves his pupil alone to deal with all those tasks for which he is already sufficiently trained. But I wish to underline three times in red ink that I mean this only as a metaphor. The fact is only this, that new situations and the new responses they prompt are kept in the light of consciousness; old and well practised ones are no longer so.  Read more at location 1602

Now this whole state of affairs, so well known from the ontogeny of our mental life, seems to me to shed light on the phylogeny of unconscious nervous processes, as in the heart beat, the peristalsis of the bowels, etc. Faced with nearly constant or regularly changing situations, they are very well and reliably practised and have, therefore, long ago dropped from the sphere of consciousness. Here too we find intermediate grades, for example, breathing, that usually goes on inadvertently, but may on account of differentials in the situation, say in smoky air or in an attack of asthma, become modified and conscious. Another instance is the bursting into tears for sorrow, joy or bodily pain, an event which, though conscious, can hardly be influenced by will. Also comical miscarriages of a mnemically inherited nature occur, as the bristling of the hair by terror, the ceasing of secretion of saliva on intense excitement, responses which must have had some significance in the past, but have lost it in the case of man.  Read more at location 1615

What in the preceding we have said and shown to be a property of nervous processes is a property of organic processes in general, namely, to be associated with consciousness inasmuch as they are new.  Read more at location 1625

****  I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Können) is unconscious.  Read more at location 1636

ETHICS 

The teaching of ethics always assumes the form of a demand, a challenge, of a ‘thou shalt’, that is in some way opposed to our primitive will. Whence comes this peculiar contrast between the ‘I will’ and the ‘thou shalt’? Is it not absurd that I am supposed to suppress my primitive appetites, disown my true self, be different from what I really am?  ... All the shalls that oppose me in this are nonsense, priests’ fraud. God is Nature, and Nature may be credited with having formed me as she wants me to be.’ Such slogans are heard occasionally. It is not easy to refute their plain and brutal obviousness. Kant’s imperative is avowedly irrational.  Read more at location 1645

For our natural self, our primitive will with its innate desires, is obviously the mental correlate of the material bequest received from our ancestors. Now as a species we are developing, and we march in the front-line of generations; thus every day of a man’s life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species, which is still in full swing.  ... The material for this transformation, the presupposition for its taking place, are of course the inheritable spontaneous mutations. However, for selection among them, the behaviour of the carrier of the mutation, his habits of life, are of outstanding importance and decisive influence.  ... The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time – it is a true continued ‘self-conquering’  Read more at location 1659

consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution. If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one’s own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it.  Read more at location 1667

(Note: this idea is echoed in "the evolution of God")  The ethical law in its simplest general form (be unselfish!) is plainly a fact, it is there, it is agreed upon even by the vast majority of those who do not very often keep it. I regard its puzzling existence as an indication of our being in the beginning of a biological transformation from an egoistic to an altruistic general attitude, of man being about to become an animal social.  Read more at location 1678

CHAPTER 2 The Future of Understanding 

We may be approaching the end of a blind alley, we may even have reached it. This would not be an exceptional event and it would not mean that our species would have to become extinct very soon. From the geological records we know that some species or even large groups seem to have reached the end of their evolutionary possibilities a very long time ago, yet they have not died out, but have remained unchanged, or without significant change, for many millions of years. The tortoises, for instance, and the crocodiles are in this sense very old groups, relics of a far remote past; we are also told that the whole large group of insects are more or less in the same boat – and they comprise a greater number of separate species than all the rest of the animal kingdom taken together. But they have changed very little in millions of years, while the rest of the living surface of the earth has during this time undergone change beyond recognition.  Read more at location 1713

even if the physical change is not yet an inheritable one, the transmission of the induced behaviour ‘by teaching’ can be a highly efficient evolutionary factor, because it throws the door open to receive future inheritable mutations with a prepared readiness to make the best use of them and thus to subject them to intense selection.  Read more at location 1841

GENETIC FIXATION OF HABITS AND SKILLS 

For the change of behaviour itself is not transmitted by physical inheritance, by the hereditary substance, the chromosomes. At first, therefore, it is certainly not fixed genetically and it is difficult to see how it should ever come to be incorporated in the hereditary treasure. This is an important problem in itself. For we do know that habits are inherited as, for instance, habits of nestbuilding in the birds, the various habits of cleanliness we observe in our dogs and cats, to mention a few obvious examples.  Read more at location 1846

By conforming to innate faculties as well as to the environment and by adapting itself to changes in either of these factors, behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude. While in plants and in the lower ranges of the animal kingdom adequate behaviour is brought about by the slow process of selection, in other words by trial and error, man’s high intelligence enables him to enact it by choice. This incalculable advantage may easily outweigh his handicap of slow and comparatively scarce propagation, which is further reduced by the biologically dangerous regard not to let our offspring exceed the volume for which livelihood can be secured.  Read more at location 1880

In a way we get the full answer, namely, this will depend on us and our doing. We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny. If we want it, we must do something about it. If not, not. Just as the political and social development and the sequence of historical events in general are not thrust upon us by the spinning of the Fates, but largely depend on our own doing, so our biological future, being nothing else but history on a large scale, must not be taken to be an unalterable destiny that is decided in advance by any Law of Nature.  Read more at location 1886

I believe that the increasing mechanization and ‘stupidization’ of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence. The more the chances in life of the clever and of the unresponsive worker are equalled out by the repression of handicraft and the spreading of tedious and boring work on the assembly line, the more will a good brain, clever hands and a sharp eye become superfluous. Indeed the unintelligent man, who naturally finds it easier to submit to the boring toil, will be favoured; he is likely to find it easier to thrive, to settle down and to beget offspring. The result may easily amount even to a negative selection as regards talents and gifts.  ... Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives. Instead of letting the ingenious machinery we have invented produce an increasing amount of superfluous luxury, we must plan to develop it so that it takes off human beings all the unintelligent, mechanical, ‘machine-like’ handling. The machine must take over the toil for which man is too good, not man the work for which the machine is too expensive, as comes to pass quite often. This will not tend to make production cheaper, but those who are engaged in it happier.  Read more at location 1910

CHAPTER 3 The Principle of Objectivation 

Nine years ago I put forward two general principles that form the basis of the scientific method, the principle of the understandability of nature, and the principle of objectivation.  Read more at location 1922

science never imposes anything, science states. Science aims at nothing but making true and adequate statements about its object.  Read more at location 1932

As regards the first, ‘that nature can be understood’, I will say here only a few words. The most astonishing thing about it is that it had to be invented, that it was at all necessary to invent it. It stems from the Milesian School, the physiologoi. Since then it has remained untouched, though perhaps not always uncontaminated. The present line in physics is possibly a quite serious contamination. The uncertainty principle, the alleged lack of strict causal connection in nature, may represent a step away from it, a partial abandonment.  Read more at location 1935

****  (Note: objectivation = creation of (illusion of) objective reality)  objectivation...  By this I mean the thing that is also frequently called the ‘hypothesis of the real world’ around us. I maintain that it amounts to a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.  Read more at location 1940

First, my own body (to which my mental activity is so very directly and intimately linked) forms part of the object (the real world around me) that I construct out of my sensations, perceptions and memories. Secondly, the bodies of other people form part of this objective world.  Read more at location 1945

I have very good reasons for believing that these other bodies are also linked up with, or are, as it were, the seats of spheres of consciousness. I can have no reasonable doubt about the existence or some kind of actualness of these foreign spheres of consciousness, yet I have absolutely no direct subjective access to any of them. Hence I am inclined to take them as something objective, as forming part of the real world around me. Moreover, since there is no distinction between myself and others, but on the contrary full symmetry for all intents and purposes, I conclude that I myself also form part of this real material world around me.  Read more at location 1946

let me just mention the two most blatant antinomies due to our awareness of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non-concerned observer. The first of these antinomies is the astonishment at finding our world picture ‘colourless, cold, mute’. Colour and sound, hot and cold are our immediate sensations; small wonder that they are lacking in a world model from which we have removed our own mental person. The second is our fruitless quest for the place where mind acts on matter or vice-versa, so well known from Sir Charles Sherrington’s honest search, magnificently expounded in Man on his Nature. The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts.  Read more at location 1953

****  Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff. Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself– withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator.  Read more at location 1996

****  While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space. We do not usually realize this fact, because we have entirely taken to thinking of the personality of a human being, or for that matter also that of an animal, as located in the interior of its body. To learn that it cannot really be found there is so amazing that it meets with doubt and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it. We have got used to localizing the conscious personality inside a person’s head – I should say an inch or two behind the midpoint of the eyes.  Read more at location 2014

It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic, just an aid for practical use. Let us, with all the knowledge we have about it, follow such a ‘tender look’ inside the body. We do hit there on a supremely interesting bustle or, if you like, machinery. We find millions of cells of very specialized build in an arrangement that is unsurveyably intricate but quite obviously serves a very far-reaching and highly consummate mutual communication and collaboration; a ceaseless hammering of regular electrochemical pulses which, however, change rapidly in their configuration, being conducted from nerve cell to nerve cell, tens of thousands of contacts being opened and blocked within every split second, chemical transformations being induced and maybe other changes as yet undiscovered. All this we meet and, as the science of physiology advances, we may trust that we shall come to know more and more about it.  Read more at location 2028

the prevailing school of thought in quantum physics, the protagonists being Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and others. Let me first give you a very brief description of their ideas. It runs as follows:5 We cannot make any factual statement about a given natural object (or physical system) without ‘getting in touch’ with it. This ‘touch’ is a real physical interaction. Even if it consists only in our ‘looking at the object’ the latter must be hit by light-rays and reflect them into the eye, or into some instrument of observation. This means that the object is affected by our observation. You cannot obtain any knowledge about an object while leaving it strictly isolated. The theory goes on to assert that this disturbance is neither irrelevant nor completely surveyable. Thus after any number of painstaking observations the object is left in a state of which some features (the last observed) are known, but others (those interfered with by the last observation) are not known, or not accurately known. This state of affairs is offered as an explanation why no complete, gapless description of any physical object is ever possible. If this has to be granted – and possibly it has to be granted – then it flies in the face of the principle of understandability of nature.  Read more at location 2053

the idea of subjectivity in all appearance is very old and familiar. What is new in the present setting is this: that not only would the impressions we get from our environment largely depend on the nature and the contingent state of our sensorium, but inversely the very environment that we wish to take in is modified by us, notably by the devices we set up in order to observe it.  Read more at location 2079

I would not like to call this a direct influence of the subject on the object. For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the ‘world of energy’, they cannot produce any change in this world of energy as we know from Spinoza and Sir Charles Sherrington. All this was said from the point of view that we accept the time-hallowed discrimination between subject and object. Though we have to accept it in everyday life ‘for practical reference’, we ought, so I believe, to abandon it in philosophical thought. Its rigid logical consequence has been revealed by Kant: the sublime, but empty, idea of the ‘thing-in-itself’ about which we forever know nothing. It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of ‘cross-references’ between them.  Read more at location 2083

*******  The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.  Read more at location 2091

CHAPTER 4 The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind 

*******  The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.  Read more at location 2101

There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly ‘Western’). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz’s fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them; the monad ‘has no windows’, it is ‘incommunicado’. That none the less they all agree with each other is called ‘pre-established harmony’  Read more at location 2112

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; and this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East.  Read more at location 2117

Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy and which is an anthology from the mystics of the most various periods and the most various peoples. Open it where you will and you find many beautiful utterances of a similar kind. You are struck by the miraculous agreement between humans of different race, different religion, knowing nothing about each other’s existence, separated by centuries and millennia, and by the greatest distances that there are on our globe. Still, it must be said that to Western thought this doctrine has little appeal, it is unpalatable, it is dubbed fantastic, unscientific. Well, so it is because our science – Greek science – is based on objectivation,  ... whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. But I do believe that this is precisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.  Read more at location 2132

one thing can be claimed in favour of the mystical teaching of the ‘identity’ of all minds with each other and with the supreme mind – as against the fearful monadology of Leibniz. The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.  ... I said just now that we are not able even to imagine a plurality of consciousnesses in one mind. We can pronounce these words all right, but they are not the description of any thinkable experience. Even in the pathological cases of a ‘split personality’ the two persons alternate, they never hold the field jointly; nay this is just the characteristic feature, that they know nothing about each other.  Read more at location 2146

One would think that such a ‘commonwealth of cells’ as each of us is would be the occasion par excellence for mind to exhibit plurality if it were at all able to do so. The expression ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state of cells’ (Zellstaat) is nowadays no longer to be regarded as a metaphor. Listen to Sherrington: To declare that, of the component cells that go to make us up, each one is an individual self-centred life is no mere phrase. It is not a mere convenience for descriptive purposes. The cell as a component of the body is not only a visibly demarcated unit but a unit-life centred on itself. It leads its own life … The cell is a unit-life, and our life which in its turn is a unitary life consists utterly of the cell-lives.  ... Both the pathology of the brain and physiological investigations on sense perception speak unequivocally in favour of a regional separation of the sensorium into domains whose far-reaching independence is amazing because it would let us expect to find these regions associated with independent domains of the mind; but they are not.  Read more at location 2168

Sherrington tells us of very interesting experiments on the threshold frequency of flickering. I shall try to give you as brief an account as possible. Think of a miniature lighthouse set up in the laboratory and giving off a great many flashes per second, say 40 or 60 or 80 or 100. As you increase the frequency of the flashes the flickering disappears at a definite frequency, depending on the experimental details; and the onlooker, whom we suppose to watch with both eyes in the ordinary way, sees then a continuous light.4 Let this threshold frequency be 60 per second in given circumstances. Now in a second experiment, with nothing else changed, a suitable contraption allows only every second flash to reach the right eye, every other flash to reach the left eye, so that every eye receives only 30 flashes per second. If the stimuli were conducted to the same physiological centre, this should make no difference:  ... However, in the second flicker experiment this is not so. Thirty flashes to the right eye plus alternating 30 flashes to the left are far from sufficient to remove the sensation of flickering; double the frequency is required for that, namely, 60 to the right and 60 to the left, if both eyes are open. Let me give you the main conclusion in Sherrington’s own words:  ... When it is a question of ‘mind’ the nervous system does not integrate itself by centralization upon a pontifical cell. Rather it elaborates a millionfold democracy whose each unit is a cell … the concrete life compounded of sublives reveals, although integrated, its additive nature and declares itself an affair of minute foci of life acting together … When however we turn to the mind there is nothing of all this. The single nerve-cell is never a miniature brain. The cellular constitution of the body need not be for any hint of it from ‘mind’ … A single pontifical brain-cell could not assure to the mental reaction a character more unified, and non-atomic than does the roof-brain’s multitudinous sheet of cells. Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does ‘life’, but not so mind.  Read more at location 2198

Sherrington’s is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it. Yet we know that a sub-mind is an atrocious monstrosity, just as is a plural-mind – neither having any counterpart in anybody’s experience, neither being in any way imaginable. I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity.  Read more at location 2211

****  Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science – a religion, however, not opposed to science, but supported by what disinterested scientific research has brought to the fore.  Read more at location 2216

****  (Note:  best argument that ours is but one form of consciousness)  It would seem queer, not to say ridiculous, to think that the contemplating, conscious mind that alone reflects the becoming of the world should have made its appearance only at some time in the course of this ‘becoming’, should have appeared contingently, associated with a very special biological contraption which in itself quite obviously discharges the task of facilitating certain forms of life in maintaining themselves, thus favouring their preservation and propagation: forms of life that were late-comers and have been preceded by many others that maintained themselves without that particular contraption (a brain).  Read more at location 2223

For do not let us forget: to say, as we did, that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliché, a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experience does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that  Read more at location 2231

(Note: thought provoking question!)  in Sherrington’s words: The universe of energy is we are told running down. It tends fatally towards an equilibrium which shall be final. An equilibrium in which life cannot exist. Yet life is being evolved without pause. Our planet in its surround has evolved it and is evolving it. And with it evolves mind. If mind is not an energy-system how will the running down of the universe affect it? Can it go unscathed? Always so far as we know the finite mind is attached to a running energy-system. When that energy-system ceases to run what of the mind which runs with it? Will the universe which elaborated and is elaborating the finite mind then let it perish?  Read more at location 2236

The thing that bewilders us is the curious double role that the conscious mind acquires. On the one hand it is the stage, and the only stage on which this whole world-process takes place, or the vessel or container that contains it all and outside which there is nothing. On the other hand we gather the impression, maybe the deceptive impression, that within this world-bustle the conscious mind is tied up with certain very particular organs (brains), which while doubtless the most interesting contraption in animal and plant physiology are yet not unique, not sui generis; for like so many others they serve after all only to maintain the lives of their owners,  Read more at location 2242

Life is valuable in itself. ‘Be reverent towards life’ is how Albert Schweitzer has framed the fundamental commandment of ethics. Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. Produced million-fold it is for the greatest part rapidly annihilated or cast as prey before other life to feed it. This precisely is the master-method of producing ever-new forms of life.  Read more at location 2266

‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ No natural happening is in itself either good or bad, nor is it in itself either beautiful or ugly. The values are missing, and quite particularly meaning and end are missing. Nature does not act by purposes. If in German we speak of a purposeful (zweckmässig) adaptation of an organism to its environment, we know this to be only a convenient way of speech.  Read more at location 2271

Most painful is the absolute silence of all our scientific investigations towards our questions concerning the meaning and scope of the whole display. The more attentively we watch it, the more aimless and foolish it appears to be. The show that is going on obviously acquires a meaning only with regard to the mind that contemplates it. But what science tells us about this relationship is patently absurd: as if mind had only been produced by that very display that it is now watching and would pass away with it when the sun finally cools down and the earth has been turned into a desert of ice and snow.  Read more at location 2275

****  No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. We know, when God is experienced, this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one’s own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time – that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: God is spirit.  Read more at location 2281

CHAPTER 5 Science and Religion 

The most important contributions from science to overcome the baffling questions ‘Who are we really? Where have I come from and where am I going?’ – or at least to set our minds at rest – I say, the most appreciable help science has offered us in this is, in my view, the gradual idealization of time. In thinking of this the names of three men obtrude themselves upon us, though many others, including non-scientists, have hit on the same groove, such as St Augustine of Hippo and Boethius; the three are Plato, Kant and Einstein.  Read more at location 2312

(Note:  on Plato)  he was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it – against reason – as a reality, more real than our actual experience; this, he said, is but a shadow of the former, from which all experienced reality is borrowed. I am speaking of the theory of forms (or ideas).  Read more at location 2326

Plato’s mind turned into a much more powerful thought, the Realm of Ideas, which appeals to the imagination, though, of necessity, it remains a mystery. But this thought sprang, as I believe, from a very real experience, namely, that he was struck with admiration and awe by the revelations in the realm of numbers and geometrical figures – as many a man was after him and the Pythagoreans were before. He recognized and absorbed deeply into his mind the nature of these revelations, that they unfold themselves by pure logical reasoning, which makes us acquainted with true relations whose truth is not only unassailable, but is obviously there, forever; the relations held and will hold irrespective of our inquiry into them. A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy.  Read more at location 2332

(Note: since proven by relativity)  Let us now turn to Kant. It has become a commonplace that he taught the ideality of space and time and that this was a fundamental, if not the most fundamental part of his teaching. Like most of it, it can be neither verified nor falsified, but it does not lose interest on this account (rather it gains; if it could be proved or disproved it would be trivial). The meaning is that, to be spread out in space and to happen in a well-defined temporal order of ‘before and after’ is not a quality of the world that we perceive, but pertains to the perceiving mind which, in its present situation anyhow, cannot help registering anything that is offered to it according to these two card-indexes, space and time. It does not mean that the mind comprehends these order-schemes irrespective of, and before, any experience, but that it cannot help developing them and applying them to experience when this comes along, and particularly that this fact does not prove or suggest space and time to be an order-scheme inherent in that ‘thing-in-itself which, as some believe, causes our experience.  Read more at location 2361

No single man can make a distinction between the realm of his perceptions and the realm of things that cause it since, however detailed the knowledge he may have acquired about the whole story, the story is occurring only once not twice.  Read more at location 2369

the supreme importance of Kant’s statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object – the world – between them in the process of ‘mind forming an idea of the world’, because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two. The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant. This liberation opens the way to belief, in the religious sense, without running all the time against the clear results which experience about the world as we know it and plain thought unmistakably pronounce. For instance – to speak of the most momentous example – experience as we know it unmistakably obtrudes the conviction that it cannot survive the destruction of the body, with whose life, as we know life, it is inseparably bound up. So is there to be nothing after this life? No. Not in the way of experience as we know it necessarily to take place in space and time. But, in an order of appearance in which time plays no part, this notion of ‘after’ is meaningless.  Read more at location 2377

Kant’s attitude towards science was incredibly naïve, as you will agree if you turn the leaves of his Metaphysical Foundations of Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft). He accepted physical science in the form it had reached during his lifetime (1724–1804) as something more or less final and he busied himself to account for its statements philosophically. This happening to a great genius ought to be a warning to philosophers ever after.  Read more at location 2389

re: Einstein...  The new view has its strongest impact on the previous notion of time. Time is the notion of ‘before and after’. The new attitude springs from the following two roots: (i) The notion of ‘before and after’ resides on the ‘cause and effect’ relation. We know, or at least we have formed the idea, that one event A can cause, or at least modify, another event A, so that if B were not, then B were not, at least not in this modified form.  Read more at location 2402

(Note: event far apart is space basically cannot be compared in time without space also effecting time)  (2) Keep this in mind. The second root is the experimental and observational evidence that effects do not spread with arbitrarily high velocity. There is an upper limit, which incidentally is the velocity of light in empty space. In human measure it is very high, it  would go round the equator about seven times in one second. Very high, but not infinite, call it c. Let this be agreed upon as a fundamental fact of nature. It then follows that the above-mentioned discrimination between ‘before and after’ or ‘earlier and later’ (based on the cause-and-effect relation) is not universally applicable, it breaks down in some cases.  Read more at location 2414

it meant the dethronement of time as a rigid tyrant imposed on us from outside, a liberation from the unbreakable rule of ‘before and after’. For indeed time is our most severe master by ostensibly restricting the existence of each of us to narrow limits – seventy or eighty years, as the Pentateuch has it.  Read more at location 2436

With very few exceptions (that really are exceptions) the course of events in nature is irreversible. If we try to imagine a time-sequence of phenomena exactly opposite to one that is actually observed – as in a cinema film projected in reversed order – such a reversed sequence, though it can easily be imagined, would nearly always be in gross contradiction to well-established laws of physical science. The general ‘directedness’ of all happening was explained by the mechanical or statistical theory of heat, and this explanation was duly hailed as its most admirable achievement.  Read more at location 2448

According to Boltzmann we are faced with the natural tendency of any state of order to turn on its own into a less orderly state, but not the other way round.  Read more at location 2456  ... I beg to be allowed to add without detailed explanations that on a very small scale, both in space and in time, such reversions have been observed (Brownian movement, Smoluchowski). To my view the ‘statistical theory of time’ has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of the events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgment to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.  Read more at location 2485

To my view the ‘statistical theory of time’ has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of the events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgment to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.  Read more at location 2488

CHAPTER 6 The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities 

****  on the one hand all our knowledge about the world around us, both that gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most carefully planned and painstaking laboratory experiments, rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world, so that in the picture or model we form of the outside world, guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent.  Read more at location 2496

While the first part of this statement is, so I believe, easily granted by everybody, the second half is perhaps not so frequently realized, simply because the non-scientist has, as a rule, a great reverence for science and credits us scientists with being able, by our ‘fabulously refined methods’, to make out what, by its very nature, no human can possibly make out and never will be able to make out.  Read more at location 2499

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electro-magnetic waves of wave-length in the neighbourhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.  Read more at location 2502

We may further ask: Is radiation in the neighbourhood of wave-length 590 μμ the only one to produce the sensation of yellow? The answer is: Not at all. If waves of 760 μμ, which by themselves produce the sensation of red, are mixed in a definite proportion with waves of 535 μμ, which by themselves produce the sensation of green, this mixture produces a yellow that is indistinguishable from the one produced by 590 μμ. Two adjacent fields illuminated, one by the mixture, the other by the single spectral light, look exactly alike, you cannot tell which is which. Could this be foretold from the wave-lengths – is there a numerical connection with these physical, objective characteristics of the waves? No.  ... it is not simply connected with the wave-lengths. There is no general rule that a mixture of two spectral lights matches one between them; for example a mixture of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ from the extremities of the spectrum gives ‘purple’, which is not produced by any single spectral light. Moreover, the said chart, the colour triangle, varies slightly from one person to the other, and differs considerably for some persons, called anomalous trichromates (who are not colour-blind).  ... The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.  Read more at location 2520

It is quite interesting to compare the perception of colour, which we have just surveyed, with that of sound. It is normally conveyed to us by elastic waves of compression and dilatation, propagated in the air. Their wave-length – or to be more accurate their frequency – determines the pitch of the sound heard. (N.B. The physiological relevance pertains to the frequency, not to the wave-length, also in the case of light, where, however, the two are virtually exact reciprocals of each other, since the velocities of propagation in empty space and in air do not differ perceptibly.) I need not tell you that the range of frequencies of ‘audible sound’ is very different from that of ‘visible light’, it ranges from about 12 or 16 per second to 20,000 or 30,000 per second, while those for light are of the order of several hundred (English) billions. The relative range, however, is much wider for sound, it embraces about 10 octaves (against hardly one for ‘visible light’); moreover, it changes with the individual, especially with age: the upper limit is regularly and considerably reduced as age advances. But the most striking fact about sound is that a mixture of several distinct frequencies never combines to produce just one intermediate pitch such as could be produced by one intermediate frequency.  Read more at location 2529

A continuous range of frequencies is always disagreeable, whether offered as a sequence, as by a siren or a howling cat, or simultaneously, which is difficult to implement, except perhaps by a host of sirens or a regiment of howling cats. This is again entirely different from the case of light perception. All the colours which we normally perceive are produced by continuous mixtures; and a continuous gradation of tints, in a painting or in nature, is sometimes of great beauty.  Read more at location 2546

The chief characteristics of sound perception are well understood in the mechanism of the ear, of which we have better and safer knowledge than of the chemistry of the retina.  Read more at location 2549

We can follow the pressure changes in the air as they produce vibrations of the ear-drum, we can see how its motion is transferred by a chain of tiny bones to another membrane and eventually to parts of the membrane inside the cochlea, composed of fibres of varying length, described above. We may reach an understanding of how such a vibrating fibre sets up an electrical and chemical process of conduction in the nervous fibre with which it is in touch. We may follow this conduction to the cerebral cortex and we may even obtain some objective knowledge of some of the things that happen there. But nowhere shall we hit on this ‘registering as sound’, which simply is not contained in our scientific picture, but is only in the mind of the person whose ear and brain we are speaking of.  Read more at location 2570

We could discuss in similar manner the sensations of touch, of hot and cold, of smell and of taste. The latter two, the chemical senses as they are sometimes called (smell affording an examination of gaseous stuffs, taste that of fluids), have this in common with the visual sensation, that to an infinite number of possible stimuli they respond with a restricted manifold of sensate qualities, in the case of taste: bitter, sweet, sour and salty and their peculiar mixtures. Smell is, I believe, more various than taste, and particularly in certain animals it is much more refined than in man. What objective features of a physical or chemical stimulus modify the sensation noticeably seems to vary greatly in the animal kingdom. Bees, for instance, have a colour vision reaching well into the ultraviolet;  ...Bats have been discovered to be sensible to extremely high frequency vibrations (‘ultra-sound’) far beyond the upper limit of human audition;  ... The human sense of hot or cold exhibits the queer feature of ‘les extrêmes se touchent’: if we inadvertently touch a very cold object, we may for a moment believe that it is hot and has burnt our fingers.  Read more at location 2586

The colour in itself tells you nothing about the wave-length; in fact we have seen before that, for example, a yellow spectral line might conceivably be not ‘monochromatic’ in the physicist’s sense, but composed of many different wave-lengths, if we did not know that the construction of our spectroscope excludes this. It gathers light of a definite wave-length at a definite position in the spectrum. The light appearing there has always exactly the same colour from whatever source it stems. Even so the quality of the colour sensation gives no direct clue whatsoever to infer the physical property, the wave-length, and that quite apart from the comparative poorness of our discrimination of hues, which would not satisfy the physicist. A priori the sensation of blue might conceivably be stimulated by long waves and that of red by short waves, instead of the other way round, as it is.  ... Many helpful devices can facilitate this work, for instance photometric recording across the plate of its transparency, which yields a magnified diagram on which the positions of the lines can be easily read. But they must be read! The observer’s senses have to step in eventually. The most careful record, when not inspected, tells us nothing.  Read more at location 2647

So we come back to this strange state of affairs. While the direct sensual perception of the phenomenon tells us nothing as to its objective physical nature (or what we usually call so) and has to be discarded from the outset as a source of information, yet the theoretical picture we obtain eventually rests entirely on a complicated array of various informations, all obtained by direct sensual perception. It resides upon them, it is pieced together from them, yet it cannot really be said to contain them. In using the picture we usually forget about them, except in the quite general way that we know our idea of a light-wave is not a haphazard invention of a crank but is based on experiment.  Read more at location 2650

this state of affairs was clearly understood by the great Democritus in the fifth century B.C., who had no knowledge of any physical measuring devices remotely comparable to those I have been telling you about (which are of the simplest used in our time). Galenus has preserved us a fragment (Diels, fr. 125), in which Democritus introduces the intellect () having an argument with the senses () about what is ‘real’. The former says: ‘Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void’, to which the senses retort: ‘Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.’  Read more at location 2655

I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter. Let me conclude with a general remark.  Read more at location 2662

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES 

many a night we would stroll back and forth between Gluckgasse and Schlüsselgasse engrossed in philosophical conversation. Little did we know then that what seemed original to us had occupied great minds for centuries already. Don’t teachers always do their best to avoid these topics for fear that they might conflict with religious doctrines and cause uncomfortable questions? This is the main reason for my turning against religion, which has never done me any harm.  Read more at location 2675

no perception in physics has ever seemed more important to me than that of Boltzmann – despite Planck and Einstein.  Read more at location 2697

I learnt two things in those years: firstly that I was not suited to experimental work, and secondly that my surroundings and the people who were part of them were no longer capable of making experimental progress on a big scale. There were many reasons for this, one of them being that in charming old Vienna well-meaning blunderers were placed, often according to seniority, in key positions, thus impeding all progress.  Read more at location 2707

(Note: Perennial Philosophy)  I was able to experiment with K. W. F. Kohlrausch and make use of a number of beautiful instruments, take them to my room, especially the optical ones, and dabble with them to my heart’s content. Thus I could set the interferometer, admire the spectra, mix colours, etc. This was also how I discovered – through the Rayleigh equation – the deuter anomaly of my eyes. Moreover I was committed to do the long practical course, so that I learnt to appreciate the significance of measuring. I wish there were more theoretical physicists who did.  Read more at location 2715

I had accepted a post as a lecturer in theoretical physics in Czernowitz and had already envisaged spending all my free time acquiring a deeper knowledge of philosophy, having just discovered Schopenhauer, who introduced me to the Unified Theory of the Upanishads.  Read more at location 2720

At this point I should like to add a remark of a more general kind. The discovery of chromosomes as the decisive factors in heredity seems to have given society the right to overlook other better-known but equally important factors such as communication, education and tradition. It is assumed that these were not so important because from the point of view of genetics they are not stable enough. This is quite true. However, there are cases such as that of Kaspar Hauser, for example, and that of a small group of Tasmanian ‘Stone Age’ children who were only recently brought to live in English surroundings and granted a first-class English upbringing, with the effect that they reached the educational level of upper-class Englishmen. Does this not prove to us that it takes both a code of chromosomes and civilized human surroundings to produce people of our kind?  Read more at location 2787

Maybe I ought to say something about my years at university between 1906 and 1910,  Read more at location 2839

Felix Klein’s group theory on the development of mathematics. The fact that the existence of a fourth harmonic element has to be accepted as an axiom in a two-dimensional structure while it can easily be proved in a three-dimensional was to him the simplest illustration of Goedel’s great theorem.  Read more at location 2847

A chronological account of someone’s life is one of the most boring things I can think of. Whether you are recalling incidents of your own life or that of someone else, you will rarely find more than the occasional experience or observation worth recounting – even if the historical order of events seems important to you at the time.  Read more at location 2895