"[1] Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?
"[1] In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic solid" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds.
Although the existence of some form of hereditary information had been hypothesized since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture.
In 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick jointly proposed the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) on the basis of, amongst other theoretical insights, X-ray diffraction experiments conducted by Rosalind Franklin.
[4] At that time, although DNA was known to be a constituent of cell nuclei, it had not yet been identified with certainty as the molecular basis of inheritance, and the concept of a "heredity molecule" was strictly theoretical, with various candidates.
Schrödinger himself is one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a theory which posits a statistical focus for understanding the natural world at subatomic scale.
He states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a large number of atoms.
He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's expectation.
The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe).
Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature".
It has been argued that, since life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state, it violates the aforementioned second law, implying that there is a paradox.
By this mechanism, the second law is obeyed, and life maintains a highly ordered state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe.