CONCEPT
The Aperiodic Crystal
Schrödinger’s 1943 inference—that the hereditary substance must be a stable, non-repeating molecular structure capable of carrying an enormous code-script—confirmed by the double helix nine years later and now illuminating, by structural parallel, the nature of a trained neural network’s weights.
In February 1943, in Dublin,
Erwin Schrödinger delivered public lectures under the title
What Is Life? He asked how the hereditary substance could persist faithfully across generations when ordinary matter at body temperature is a chaos of thermal jostling that should scramble any delicate arrangement. His answer was a specific kind of solid: not a regular repeating crystal like salt, whose repetition carries no information, and not an amorphous solid, which would be unstable. The hereditary material must be an
aperiodic crystal—regular enough in its backbone to be stable against thermal noise, yet irregular enough in its sequence that the precise arrangement could carry an enormous amount of information. The arrangement itself, he proposed, was a code-script, simultaneously the architect's plan and the builder's craft. This was 1943, a decade before Watson and Crick, and both of them later credited
What Is Life? with drawing them toward the problem. The double helix was exactly