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In spring 1943, Nobel Prize winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger gave a series of lectures at Trinity College, Dublin. These lectures were subsequently published as the non-fiction science book ‘What is life?’.

Schrödinger took a physicist’s approach to the question, asking whether living organisms could be understood in terms of fundamental matter. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, has credited the book as being the inspiration for his initial research.

In this lecture, Nobel Prize winner and President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, also takes inspiration from the book to ask what can we now say about the nature of life?

Biography

Sir Paul Nurse is President of the Royal Society, a role he took up in December 2010. He is a Nobel-prize winning geneticist, being awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Leland H. Hartwell and R. Timothy Hunt for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation bycyclin and cyclin dependent kinases.

About the Schrodinger lecture

The Erwin Schrödinger Lecture is an annual event named after the noted Austrian scientist. Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist and a significant contributor to the wave theory of matter, a form of quantum physics. He mathematically devised an equation of wave mechanics that bears his name. He was a co-recipient of the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics. Today he is popularly known for the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.