What Is Life? — A Thermodynamic Definition of Biological Persistence

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? predicted the genetic code and framed life as a physics problem. But he was writing before the DNA double helix, before Mitchell's proton-motive force, before Prigogine's dissipative structures, before Landauer's information thermodynamics. He had the intuition. He didn't have the tools.

Eighty-two years later, we do.

This preprint attempts to complete Schrödinger's program: a single, dimensionally exact, zero-parameter power balance governing biological persistence at every scale:

Power In = Power Out + Power Stored

Every term is in watts. Every symbol is measurable in a laboratory. Validated across 50 species from methanogens to blue whales, spanning 21 orders of magnitude in mass and nine distinct metabolic chemistries, with no free parameters fitted.

If it continues to hold under scrutiny: we offer the first dimensionally exact, chemistry-agnostic definition of biological persistence: not a qualitative checklist, but a measurable power balance, with a quantitative basis for synthetic biology and detecting life beyond Earth.