I was just rereading Erwin Schrödinger’s pathbreaking 1944 lectures What is Life? which is often praised for its prescience — and influence — on the foundational principals of genetics in the second half of the twentieth century. At one point, in developing the crucial importance of his concept of negative entropy as the driver of life, he remarked on the misunderstanding that “energy” is what organisms draw from their food. In an ironic aside he says
In some very advanced country (I don’t remember whether it was Germany or the U.S.A. or both) you could find menu cards in restaurants indicating, in addition to the price, the energy content of every dish.
Also prescient!
How odd that the only biological organisms that Schrödinger is today commonly associated with are cats…
