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
Interaction information Interaction information The interaction information (McGill 1954), or amounts of information (Hu Kuo Ting, 1962) or co-information (Bell 2003) or information interaction (Licina 2017) is one of several generalizations of the mutual information. In fact, the definition of interaction information is identical to that of multivariate mutual information except for a change in sign in the case of an odd number of random variables except in the work of Licina where information is more like a physical entitiy. Interaction information expresses the amount information (redundancy or synergy) bound up in a set of variables, "beyond" that which is present in