What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a 1944 science book written for the lay reader by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he was Director of Theoretical Physics, at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned "that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized." Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?"

In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic solid" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1940s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the chemical basis of genetic inheritance. Although the existence of some form of hereditary information had been hypothesized since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture. In 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick jointly proposed the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) on the basis of, amongst other theoretical insights, X-ray diffraction experiments conducted by Rosalind Franklin. They both credited Schrödinger's book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each independently acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.

The book, published in 1944, is based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin in February 1943, attended by Éamon de Valera and his cabinet. At that time, although DNA was known to be a constituent of cell nuclei, it had not yet been identified with certainty as the molecular basis of inheritance, and the concept of a "heredity molecule" was strictly theoretical, with various candidates. One of the most successful branches of physics at this time was statistical physics. Schrödinger himself is one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, a theory which posits a statistical focus for understanding the natural world at subatomic scale.

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?, the American geneticist Hermann J. Muller, who would later win a Nobel Prize in 1946, had in his 1922 article "Variation due to Change in the Individual Gene" already laid out all the basic properties of the "heredity molecule" (not yet known to be DNA) which Schrödinger re-derived in 1944 "from first principles" in What is Life? (including the "aperiodicity" of the molecule), properties which Muller specified and refined additionally in his 1929 article "The Gene As The Basis of Life" and during the 1930s. Muller himself wrote in a 1960 letter to a journalist^{[citation needed]} regarding What Is Life? that whatever the book got right about the "hereditary molecule" had already been published before 1944 and that Schrödinger's were only the wrong speculations; Muller also named two famous geneticists, including Delbrück, who knew every relevant pre-1944 publication and had been in contact with Schrödinger before 1944. DNA as the molecule of heredity became foremost only after Oswald Avery's bacterial-transformation experiments published in 1944; before those experiments, proteins were considered the most likely candidates. DNA was confirmed as the molecule in question by the Hershey–Chase experiment conducted in 1952.

In Chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle "order-from-disorder". As an example he mentions diffusion, which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is nevertheless caused by random movement of atoms or molecules. As the number of atoms is reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes increasingly random. He states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a large number of atoms.

In Chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at the time about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates on the role mutations play in biological evolution. He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.

In Chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules, which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as the solution. Even though molecules had long been known to exist, their stability could not be explained by classical physics due to the discrete nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.

He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are composed of highly ordered crystals. The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles, and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid". On the other hand, an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity. Schrödinger writes that the heredity material is likely to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an "aperiodic crystal". Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance with them.