• Corpus ID: 53048344

Chapter 1 A Quantum Origin of Life ?

@inproceedings{Davies2009Chapter1A,
  title={Chapter 1 A Quantum Origin of Life ?},
  author={Paul C. W. Davies},
  year={2009}
}

• P. Davies
• Published 2009
• Physics

The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. In the nineteenth century, many scientists believed that life was some sort of magic matter. The continued use of the term “organic chemistry” is a hangover from that era. The assumption that there is a chemical recipe for life led to the hope that, if only we knew the details, we could mix up the right stuff in a test tube and make life in the lab. Most research on biogenesis has followed that tradition, by assuming chemistry was a bridge—albeit a long one—from matter to life. Elucidating the chemical pathway has been a tantalizing goal, spurred on by the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952, in which amino acids were made by sparking electricity through a mixture of water and common gases [Miller (1953)]. But this concept turned out to be something of a blind alley, and further progress with pre-biotic chemical synthesis has been frustratingly slow. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger published his famous lectures under the title What is Life? [Schrödinger (1944)] and ushered in the age of molecular biology. Schödinger argued that the stable transmission of genetic information from generation to generation in discrete bits implied a quantum mechanical process, although he was unaware of the role of or the specifics of genetic encoding. The other founders of quantum mechanics, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Eugene Wigner shared Schrödinger’s belief that quantum physics was the key to understanding the phenomenon