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
Yukawa interaction explained by the fact that the Yukawa particle has spin zero and even spin always results in an attractive potential. The negative sign of the exponential gives the interaction an effectively finite range, so that particles at great distances will hardly interact any longer (interaction forces drop off exponentially with increasing separation). Now suppose that the potential formula_7 has a minimum not at formula_18 but at some non-zero value formula_19. This can happen, for example, with a potential form such as formula_20 with formula_9 set to an imaginary value. In this case, the Lagrangian exhibits spontaneous symmetry breaking. This is