When Schrödinger Reinvented the Wheel

Introduction

One malaise of contemporary science rarely named alongside reproducibility failures or perverse publication incentives is what I call the citation crisis. The idea is very simple: in an era when the literature multiplies by the minute, few can read broadly enough to see the full ancestry of ideas, especially across disciplinary borders. Inevitably, bright, well-meaning researchers “reinvent the wheel,” often by renaming a preexisting concept and, sometimes, claiming novelty because parallel work sits outside their citation habitat. The cost is cumulative. Science advances by accreting insight: Newton’s shoulders-of-giants dictum is not a platitude but an operating principle. When we sever our intellectual lineages, we exchange synthesis for duplication and momentum for drift.

This is hardly a modern pathology. Even great minds have had blind spots about precedence. Which brings us to Erwin Schrödinger, a laureled architect of quantum mechanics whose 1944 book What Is Life? became a touchstone for generations of theoretical biologists. That slim volume drew physicists to living matter and helped set the stage for the molecular era. I clarify at this point that my aim here is not to subtract from its catalytic historical role. Rather, I want to probe one specific claim for which Schrödinger is often credited: that living organisms are persistent, out-of-equilibrium systems that “feed on” order—on negative entropy. As I will argue, this was not a virgin insight. Decades earlier, theorists in Central Europe had formulated the same principle with remarkable clarity. The story that follows is less a debunking of Schrödinger than a case study in how ideas migrate, mutate, and (when citations fail) appear to be born anew.

I would like to thank Georgii Karelin for sharing much of the information presented in this essay, as well as for his valuable help with a translation of a Russian text that I will reference below. It was thanks to him that I decided to write about this.

What Is Life?

Schrödinger’s book was pitched as a physicist’s foray into biology; a compact argument that the “vital parts” of organisms differ in statistical structure from the systems physicists had studied, and that heredity must be stored in a robust “aperiodic crystal,” an irregular solid whose intricate order encodes a “code-script” for development. He writes that “the most essential part of a living cell—the chromosome fibre—may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal,” contrasting it with the repetitive wallpaper of periodic crystals; the analogy leads him to the chromosome as a material carrier of information and to the notion of a miniature code-script that specifies the organism’s four-dimensional pattern of development.

As explained by Sydney Brenner in Life’s code script, Schrödinger confused the program and the constructor, in which he saw chromosomes as “architect’s plan and builder’s craft in one”. This is wrong. The code script contains only a description of the executive function, not the function itself. This essential difference was later clarified by von Neumann and his kinematic automaton. Equally famous is Schrödinger’s thermodynamic motif. In a chapter baldly titled “Order, Disorder and Entropy,” he declares that “living matter evades the decay to equilibrium—it feeds on ‘negative entropy’,” glossing this as an organism’s extracting order from its surroundings to preserve organization against entropic drift. The rhetorical force of that line, its memorable inversion, helped seal the book’s reputation as a unifier of physics and life.

As a piece of scientific writing, What Is Life? succeeded because it melded clear metaphors with a judicious sense for physical constraint. The “aperiodic crystal” presciently points toward the informational stability of DNA; the “code-script” anticipates a logic of heredity; the negative-entropy slogan dramatizes open-system thermodynamics. But here is the hinge of this essay: the nonequilibrium insight was not born ex nihilo in 1944. When describing life as a nonequilibrium phenomenon, the trail runs back at least a quarter century.

Bauer and von Bertalanffy

Two names frame the missing genealogy: Ervin Bauer and Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The latter is widely remembered for developing General Systems Theory and for arguing that wholes have organization irreducible to parts. The former, less known for the West academics, developed a thermodynamic principle of sustainable non-equilibrium as the defining mark of life. Von Bertalanffy first described life as a non-equilibrium phenomenon in his 1932 book, Theoretische Biologie; it was until his 1953 essay An Outline of General System Theory, which was later published in the book General System Theory in 1968, where we finally found reference to Bauer’s work.

Bauer’s record is unusually clear because we now have English translations of his seminal texts. In 1920, working in Göttingen, he published in German Die Grundprinzipien der rein naturwissenschaftlichen Biologie. There, Bauer defines living beings as organized systems that maintain a non-equilibrium state by converting environmental energy into forms that act against equilibration. The following is a statement by Bauer that captures, in one breath, metabolic openness, structural maintenance, and work against the gradient toward equilibrium:

“We define as living beings all body systems, which are not in equilibrium and organized in a way that the energy forms in their given environment are converted into such forms of energy which, in the given environment, act against the establishment of an equilibrium state.”

He deepened this in his 1935 book Theoretical Biology, where the formulation becomes unmistakable: “living systems are never at equilibrium; at the expense of their free energy they constantly perform work to avoid the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions.” Bauer links this not merely to passive maintenance but to a law of motion for living matter: the system’s own structure stores free energy and does work against equilibration, making metabolism the ongoing renewal of a non-equilibrium architecture rather than fuel burned for external labor.

These are not scattered aphorisms. Bauer builds a program: metabolism as a dynamic, sustainable non-equilibrium network with computable limits of assimilation; structural energy that funds internal work to preserve organization; even early gestures toward what we now call programmed cell death in developmental trade-offs. The translations make plain how comprehensive, if occasionally dated in mechanism, this theory was. So why is Bauer’s name not as widely paired with “negative entropy” as Schrödinger’s? History intervened.

Bauer and his wife were executed in Stalin’s Great Terror; Theoretical Biology appeared in Russian and for decades only fragments were accessible in Western languages. The biography and editorial notes document the scarcity, intermittent reprints, and the modern effort to resurface and translate both the 1920 and 1935 works in full. That archival trajectory explains why, for many outside Eastern and Central Europe, Bauer’s principle has felt “new” when rephrased later.

As for von Bertalanffy, his organismic vision and cross-level organization thesis were circulating by mid-century, often in venues and vocabularies orthogonal to physics. Whether Schrödinger read or ignored such work is hard to adjudicate from the record. What is clear is that Bauer wrote in German in 1920, that his principle of sustaining non-equilibrium predates What Is Life?, and that the core thermodynamic insight so often attributed to Schrödinger had already been cast with conceptual precision by Bauer—down to the emphasis on active work to resist equilibration.

Conclusion

Independent discovery is real. Ideas can be “in the air,” converged upon from different angles; Newton and Leibniz with calculus; Darwin and Wallace with natural selection; Einstein and Hilbert with the field equations. Schrödinger’s synthesis belongs in that family of catalytic convergences: it galvanized a generation by framing heredity as a physical problem and by dramatizing life’s defiance of equilibrium in a phrase that traveled. But if we care about the genealogy of concepts (and we must, lest we squander effort and dilute credit) then we should say the full sentence: Schrödinger popularized a nonequilibrium vision of life that Ervin Bauer had already formalized and systematized.

The broader lesson returns us to the citation crisis. Our infrastructures reward salami-sliced novelty and accelerate publication far faster than comprehension. A healthier economy of ideas would prize synthesis and lineage: tracing how a concept was built, where it was missed across linguistic or political borders, whom it empowered and whom it erased. It is encouraging that the last few years (e.g., here, here, and here) have seen complete English translations of Bauer’s early German and later Russian texts and renewed historical scholarship that rethreads the broken line between Central European theoretical biology and postwar molecularism.

That work doesn’t diminish Schrödinger’s book. On the contrary, it enriches it by restoring the plural origins of an idea we too easily compress into a single name. We owe our future theories of life—not only to charismatic metaphors like “negative entropy,” but to the meticulous early architects of non-equilibrium biology who built the wheel before it was reinvented.