Heat capacity system. When expressing the same phenomenon as an intensive property, the heat capacity is divided by the amount of substance, mass, or volume, thus the quantity is independent of the size or extent of the sample. The molar heat capacity is the heat capacity per unit amount (SI unit: mole) of a pure substance, and the specific heat capacity, often called simply specific heat, is the heat capacity per unit mass of a material. Nonetheless some authors use the term specific heat to refer to the ratio of the specific heat capacity of a substance at any given temperature to
What Is Life? published in 1944. At that time DNA was not yet accepted as the carrier of hereditary information, which only was the case after the Hershey–Chase experiment of 1952. One of the most successful branches of physics at this time was statistical physics, and quantum mechanics, a theory which is also very statistical in its nature. Schrödinger himself is one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. Max Delbrück's thinking about the physical basis of life was an important influence on Schrödinger. However, long before the publication of "What is Life?", geneticist and 1946 Nobel-prize winner H. J. Muller had in