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deep insight into the forces involved in their bonding. But Schrödinger felt something was missing. Crystals are too orderly—built up in “the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure in three directions again and again.” Elaborate though they seem, crystalline solids contain just a few types of atoms. Life must depend on a higher level of complexity, structure without predictable repetition, he argued. He invented a term: aperiodic crystals. This was his hypothesis: We believe a gene—or perhaps the whole chromosome fiber—to be an aperiodic solid.♦ He could hardly emphasize enough the glory of this difference, between periodic and aperiodic:

The difference in structure is of the same kind as that between an ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design.♦

Some of his most admiring readers, such as Léon Brillouin, the French physicist recently decamped to the United States, said that Schrödinger was too clever to be completely convincing, even as they demonstrated in their own work just how convinced they were. Brillouin was particularly taken with the comparison to crystals, with their elaborate but inanimate structures. Crystals have some capacity for self-repair, he noted; under stress, their atoms may shift to new positions for the sake of equilibrium. That may be understood in terms of thermodynamics and now quantum mechanics. How much more exalted, then, is self-repair in the organism: “The living organism heals its own wounds, cures its sicknesses, and may rebuild large portions of its structure when they have been destroyed by some accident. This is the most striking and unexpected behavior.”♦ He followed Schrödinger, too, in using entropy to connect the smallest and largest scales.

The earth is not a closed system, and life feeds upon energy and negative entropy leaking into the earth system.… The cycle reads: first, creation of unstable equilibriums (fuels, food, waterfalls, etc.); then use of these reserves by all living creatures.

Living creatures confound the usual computation of entropy. More generally, so does information. “Take an issue of The New York Times, the book on cybernetics, and an equal weight of scrap paper,” suggested Brillouin. “Do they have the same entropy?” If you are feeding the furnace, yes. But not if you are a reader. There is entropy in the arrangement of the ink spots.

For that matter, physicists themselves go around transforming negative entropy into information, said Brillouin. From observations and measurements, the physicist derives scientific laws; with these laws, people create machines never seen in nature, with the most improbable structures. He wrote this in 1950, as he was leaving Harvard to join the IBM Corporation in Poughkeepsie.♦

That was not the end for Maxwell’s demon—far from it. The problem could not truly be solved, the demon effectively banished without a deeper understanding of a realm far removed from thermodynamics: mechanical computing. Later, Peter Landsberg wrote its obituary this way: “Maxwell’s demon died at the age of 62 (when a paper by Leó Szilárd appeared), but it continues to haunt the castles of physics as a restless and lovable poltergeist.”♦

10 | LIFE’S OWN CODE

(The Organism Is Written in the Egg)

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life.” It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal.

—Richard Dawkins (1986)♦

SCIENTISTS LOVE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLES. If traits are handed down from one generation to the next, these traits must take some primal form or have some carrier. Hence the putative particle of protoplasm. “The biologist must be allowed as much scientific use of the imagination as the physicist,” The Popular Science