ounding Fathers
Marc Washington

Dating from nearly the first quarter of the 20th century, most of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics held the outspoken belief that, "in the world of the quantum is found the root to life." These include Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Herman Wyle. Other outstanding people were in this group as well among them, Alfred North Whitehead. In 1927, Herman Weyl remarked in Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science that:

The elementary laws of matter that physics reveals and chemistry is ruled by are no doubt binding on living matter. Hence, such a profound change of physics as brought about by quantum theory must have repercussions in biology ... biology will rest on physics, and not the other way around.

Max Born wrote: "Proximity in the periodic table reveals genetic relationships, just as when the relations of form between organisms were interpreted by Darwin as meaning succession in time, an evolution." Werner Heisenberg affirmed that the trend of observing biology through the lens of quantum physics in his mind had been well-established:

There has been an increasing tendency in modern biology to explain biological processes as consequences of the laws of physics and chemistry ... There can be no doubt that the laws of quantum theory play a very important role in biological phenomena.

Alfred North Whitehead, the English mathematician and philosopher who taught at Harvard stated: "Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms." Niels Bohr of the Copenhagen School declared in 1933 that:

If we were able to push the analysis of the mechanism of living organisms as far as that of atomic phenomena, we would scarcely expect to find any features differing from the properties of inorganic matter.

And, in 1943 Erwin Schrödinger in his book, What is Life? offered explanations (not included here) for the following claim:

We must not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of phyics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter ... [Life] is in my opinion, nothing else than the principle of quantum theory over again.

Bibliography supplied on request