Erwin Shroedinger

“He was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and then in the 1940s he began to think about biology. At that time the big problem was how biological information is encoded. This is just before Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA and explained the whole thing. About ten years before though, Shroedinger asked this question: can I take this very simplistic way we have of thinking in physics, namely that we like to reduce everything to a very simple mathematical formula (which seems to work actually pretty well) and take that over to biology and start to understand some more complicated processes within a cell, or maybe even light propagation, in terms of physics? The interesting thing there is that he concludes somewhere that classical Newtonian mechanics is probably not sufficient to understand biological things, and we might have to use the full quantum mechanics to understand that. And he comes so close to getting the right mechanism for propagating biological information that he almost managed to scoop Watson and Crick.” Read more...

The best books on Quantum Theory

Vlatko Vedral, Physicist