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
Physics in the medieval Islamic world physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further, especially placing emphasis on observation and "a priori" reasoning, developing early forms of the scientific method. With Aristotelian physics, physics was seen as lower than demonstrative mathematical sciences, but in terms of a larger theory of knowledge, physics was higher than astronomy; many of whose principles derive from physics and metaphysics. The primary subject of physics, according to Aristotle, was motion or change; there were three factors involved with this change, underlying thing, privation, and form. In his "Metaphysics", Aristotle believed that the "Unmoved Mover" was responsible