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
Moment (physics) Moment (physics) In physics, a moment is an expression involving the product of a distance and another physical quantity, and in this way it accounts for how the physical quantity is located or arranged. Moments are usually defined with respect to a fixed reference point; they deal with physical quantities as measured at some distance from that reference point. For example, the moment of force acting on an object, often called torque, is the product of the force and the distance to the object (i.e., the reference point). In principle, any physical quantity can be multiplied by distance to produce