I will be first year undergraduate at Physics department next year and last year I was at the Medicine faculty. I want do double major in the second year of faculty with Molecular Biology and Genetics. The intersection of biology and physics is my interest. I have two books about biology, first one is What is Life?-Mind and Matter by Erwin Schrödinger and the second one is This is Biology by Ernst Mayr. Which one should I read to acquire general knowledge about Biology?
Answer
The books you have
The books you cited won't help you to get a solid and general basic knowledge in biology. I haven't read those books but I think that This is Biology is a book of philosophy of biology written by a biologist and philosopher. What is life is a very influential book written by a physicist who more or less predicted the structure of DNA that was later discovered by Watson and Crick. You won't learn much of biology through these books.
Book Suggestions
This post offers book suggestions for general introductory biology. Here is another post that may also interest you
If you are interested in a specific field of biology, then you may want to ask for book suggestions for this particular field. I think that most biologists that come from a background in physics are in the fields of theoretical evolutionary biology, bioinformatics and biophysics (incl. molecular biophysics).
Here are a bunch of other posts asking for book recommendations that I imagine you may like reading about.
And eventually you may want to read Value of mathematical models in biology although the post has been closed.
Of course, you might want to read a bunch of wikipedia pages such as Biophysics, Molecular Biophysics, Mathematical and Theoretical Biology, Biostatistics, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics.
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