Background

Erwin Schrödinger was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, Austria. Erwin was the only child in a wealthy and cultured Viennese family. His father, Rudolf Schrödinger, ran a small linoleum factory which he had inherited from his own father. Erwin's mother, Emily Bauer, was half English, this side of the family coming from Leamington Spa, and half Austrian with her father coming from Vienna.

Education

Schrödinger learned English and German almost at the same time due to the fact that both were spoken in the household. He was not sent to elementary school but received lessons at home from a private tutor up to the age of ten. He then entered the Akademisches Gymnasium in the autumn of 1898, rather later than was usual since he spent a long holiday in England around the time he might have entered the school. He wrote later about his time at the Gymnasium: "I was a good student in all subjects, loved mathematics and physics, but also the strict logic of the ancient grammars, hated only memorizing incidental dates and facts. Of the German poets, I loved especially the dramatists, but hated the pedantic dissection of their works."

Schrödinger graduated from the Akademisches Gymnasium in 1906 and, in that year, entered the University of Vienna. As a student Schrödinger regularly attended the theater in Vienna and was a passionate admirer of Franz Grillparzer. He kept an album containing programs of the performances he had seen and made extensive annotations on them. He did not, however, neglect his studies. In 1907, during his third semester at the University of Vienna, he began to attend lectures in theoretical physics, which had just been resumed after a nearly two-year interruption following the death of Boltzm In theoretical physics, he studied analytical mechanics, applications of partial differential equations to dynamics, eigenvalue problems, Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic theory, optics, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. It was Fritz Hasenöhrl's lectures on theoretical physics which had the greatest influence on Schrödinger. In mathematics, he was taught calculus and algebra by Franz Mertens, function theory, differential equations, and mathematical statistics by Wilhelm Wirtinger (whom he found uninspiring as a lecturer). He also studied projective geometry, algebraic curves, and continuous groups in lectures given by Gustav Kohn.

On May 20, 1910, Schrödinger was awarded his doctorate for the dissertation On the conduction of electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air.

Career

In 1911 Schrödinger became an assistant to Franz S. Exner at the University of Vienna's Second Physics Institute, where he remained until the outbreak of war. During these years Egon von Schweidler was Privatdozent at the university; Schrödinger was obliged to supervise the large physics laboratory courses, a duty for which he was very thankful all his life because it taught him "through direct observation what measuring means."

Schrödinger served in World War I as an officer in the fortress artillery; and in the isolated areas where he was stationed, he often had time to study physics. In 1916, while at Prosecco, he learned the fundamentals of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which he at first found quite difficult to understand. Soon, however, he was able to follow Einstein’s train of thought and the relevant calculations; he found much in the initial presentation of the theory that was "unnecessarily complicated."

As early as 1918 Schrödinger had a sure prospect of obtaining a position; he was to succeed Josef Geitler as an extraordinary professor of theoretical physics at the University of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). "I intended to lecture there honorably on theoretical physics, at first on the model of the splendid lectures of my beloved teacher, fallen in the war, Fritz Hasenöhrl, and beyond this to study philosophy, deeply immersed as I then was in the writings of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Mach, Richard Semon, and Richard Avenarius," The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy prevented this plan, and after the war, he worked again at the Second Physics Institute in Vienna. As a result, Schrödinger’s first scientific papers were in the experimental field. In 1913, at the summer home of Egon von Schweidler at Seeham, Schrödinger collaborated with K. W. F. Kohlrausch on a work that was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and that was published as "Radium-A-Gehalt der Atmosphäre in Seeham 1913."

In 1920 Schrödinger moved to Jena, where he was an assistant to Max Wien in the experimental physics laboratory. He left Jena after only four months, in order to accept an extraordinary professorship at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart. He remained there for only one semester; in the meantime, he had received three offers of full professorships-from Kiel, Breslau, and Vienna. He would have preferred to succeed Hasenöhrl at Vienna, but the working conditions for university professors in Austria were then so poor that this alternative was unacceptable. Instead, he went to Breslau, where in few weeks after his arrival he received and accepted an offer to assume the chair formerly held by Einstein and Max von Laue at Zurich.

While at Zurich, Schrödinger worked chiefly on problems related to the statistical theory of heat. He wrote papers on gas and reaction kinetics, oscillation problems, and the thermodynamics of lattice vibrations and their contribution to internal energy; in other works, he elucidated aspects of mathematical statistics. In an article on the theory of specific heats and in a monograph on statistical thermodynamics, he gave a comprehensive account of the latter subject.

Although Schrödinger published several contributions to the old quantum theory, he did not pursue that topic systematically. His first papers on relativity pointed to a second major field of interest. In addition to these works, and his early papers on relativity, Schrödinger made a detailed study, through both measurement and computation, of the metric of color space and the theory of color vision. The main results of his efforts were an article in J. H. J. Möller and C. S. M. Pouillet’s Lehrbuch der Physik and the acceptance by physiologists of his interpretation of the relationship between the frequency of red-green color blindness and that of the blue-yellow type.

In 1927 Schrödinger accepted the prestigious offer, which had been declined by Arnold Sommerfeld, to succeed Max Plank in the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. At the same time, he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The University of Zurich vainly sought to persuade him to stay, offering him, among other inducements, a double professorship jointly with the Eidgenödinger Technische Hochschule. Schrodinger was content in Zurich, despite occasional complaints; and his stay there had been very fruitful for the development of his scientific thought. Clearly, however, the city could not compete with Berlin, where, in the truest sense of the phrase, "physics was done." Berlin. with its two universities, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, and numerous industrial laboratories, offered the possibility of contact with a large number of first-rate physicists and chemists. Still, Schrödinger did not find it easy to make the decision. It was Max Plank who finally brought the vacillating Schrödinger to Berlin with the words: "It would make me happy" - as Schrödinger himself recorded in the Planck family guest book.

Although Schrödinger was extremely fond of nature, especially the Alps, and dreaded the prospect of living in a big city, he very much enjoyed his years in Berlin. He developed a close friendship with Planck, whose scientific and philosophical views were similar to his own. After the "wandering years from 1920 to 1927," this time of his life was "the very beautiful teaching and learning period."

In 1933 Schrödinger was deeply outraged at the new regime and its dismissal of outstandingly qualified scientists. Frederick A.Lindemann (later Viscount Cherwell) offered him the support of Imperial Chemical Industries; and after a summer vacation in Wolkenstein in the Grödenertal (Val Gardena), where he had a depressing meeting with Born and Weyl, Schrödinger moved to Oxford at the beginning of November. The fifth day after his arrival, he was accepted as a fellow of Magdalen College. At the same time, the Times of London called his hotel to tell him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 1933, jointly with P. A. M. Dirac.

At Oxford, Schrödinger gradually became so homesick for Austria that he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept a post at Graz in the winter semester of 1936–1937. After the Anschluss, he was subjected to strong pressure from the National Socialists, who had not forgotten his emigration from Germany in 1933. His friends at Oxford observed his difficulties with great concern.

As early as May 1938 Eamon de Valera, who had once been a professor of mathematics at the University of Dublin, attempted to find a way of bringing Schrödinger to Ireland. By the time Schrödinger was dismissed, without notice, from his position at Graz on 1 September 1938, the first steps had already been taken. Fortunately, Schrödinger had been left his passport and was able to depart unhindered, although with only a small amount of baggage and no money. Passing through Rome and Geneva, he first returned to Oxford. De Valera had a law passed in the Irish Parliament establishing the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; but in order to keep busy until it opened, Schrödinger accepted a visiting professorship at Ghent University.

At the beginning of September 1939, Schrödinger, as a German émigré, suddenly found himself an enemy alien: but once more de Valera came to his assistance, Through the Irish high commissioner in Great Britain, he arranged for a letter of safe conduct to be issued for Schrödinger, who on 5 October 1939 passed through England on his way to Dublin with a transit visa valid for twenty-four hours. Schrödinger spent the next seventeen years in the Irish capital, where he was able to work in his new position undisturbed by external events. He later called these years of exile "a very, very beautiful time. Otherwise, I would have never gotten to know and learned to love this beautiful island of Ireland. It is impossible to imagine what would have happened if, instead, I had been in Graz for these seventeen years."

The new Institute for Advanced Studies consisted of two sections, theoretical physics, and Celtic languages, both located in a former townhouse on Merrion Square in Dublin. Young physicists from all over the world were given stipends enabling them to spend one or two years there. On the average, there were ten to fifteen scholars in residence. Among them were Walter Thirring, Friedrich Mautner, Bruno Bertotti, and H. E. Peng. Like many of the others, Peng had previously worked with Max Born at Edinburgh. The yearly "summer school" in Dublin became famous as an informal gathering for the discussion of current problems of physics. Born and Dirac were frequent participants, and de Valera often came too

In the years after his departure from Germany, Schrödinger published many works on the application and statistical interpretation of wave mechanics, on the mathematical character of the new statistics, and on its relationship to the statistical theory of heat. He also dealt with questions concerning general relativity, notably the relativistic treatment of wave fields, in contradistinction to the initial, nonrelativistic formulation of wave mechanics. In addition he wrote on a number of cosmological problems.

In his last creative period Schrödinger turned to a thorough study of the foundations of physics and their implications for philosophy and for the development of a world view. He wrote a number of studies on this subject in book form, most of them appearing first in English and then in German translation. It becomes particularly evident from the posthumously published Meine Weltansicht that Schrödinger was greatly concerned with the ancient Indian Philosophy of life (Vedanta), which had led him to concepts that closely approximate Albert Schweitzer’s "reverence for life."

Soon after the end of World War II, Austria tried to convince Schrödinger to return home. Even the president, Karl Renner, personally intervened in 1946; but Schrödinger was not willing to return while Vienna was under Soviet occupation. In the succeeding years he often visited the Tirol with his wife, but he did not return definitively until 1956 when he was given his own chair at the University of Vienna. A year later he turned seventy, the customary retirement age in Austria but lectured for a further year.

In 1957 Schrödinger survived an illness that threatened his life, and he never fully recovered his health.

Achievements

• 

  Irwin Schrödinger's most important scientific contributions are his work in wave mechanics and the Schrodinger equation, which has been called one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. Schrödinger is also famous for the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, in which he attempted to show the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. Schrödinger received the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics together with Paul Dirac for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.
  
  Because of his exceptional gifts, Schrödinger was able in the course of his life to make significant contributions to nearly all branches of science and philosophy, an almost unique accomplishment at a time when the trend was toward increasing technical specialization in these disciplines.
  
  In his last years, Austria honored Schrödinger with a lavish display of gratitude and recognition. Immediately after his return to the country in 1956, he received the prize of the city of Vienna. The national government endowed a prize bearing Schrödinger’s name to be awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Schrödinger was its first recipient. In 1957 he was awarded the Austrian Medal for Arts and Science.
  
  On 27 May 1957 Schrödinger was accepted into the German order Pour le mérite. He was also granted honorary doctorates from a number of universities and was a member of many scientific associations, including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences.
  
  A moon crater is named after him.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • My View of the World

    (A Nobel prize winner, a great man, and a great scientist,...)

    1983
  • Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism

    (Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the most dist...)

  • What is Life?: With Mind and Matter

    (Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one o...)

    1974
  • Space-Time Structure 1950

Religion

Although Schrödinger was raised by Lutheran parents, he became an atheist.

Views

At the age of 39, Erwin Schrödinger produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. In those papers, he described his partial differential equation that is the basic equation of quantum mechanics and bears the same relation to the mechanics of the atom as Newton’s equations of motion bear to planetary astronomy. Adopting a proposal made by Louis de Broglie in 1924 that particles of matter have a dual nature and in some situations act like waves, Schrödinger introduced a theory describing the behavior of such a system by a wave equation that is now known as the Schrödinger equation. The solutions to Schrödinger’s equation, unlike the solutions to Newton’s equations, are wave functions that can only be related to the probable occurrence of physical events. The definite and readily visualized sequence of events of the planetary orbits of Newton is, in quantum mechanics, replaced by the more abstract notion of probability.

This aspect of the quantum theory made Schrödinger and several other physicists profoundly unhappy, and he devoted much of his later life to formulating philosophical objections to the generally accepted interpretation of the theory that he had done so much to create. His most famous objection was the 1935 thought experiment that later became known as Schrödinger’s cat. A cat is locked in a steel box with a small amount of a radioactive substance such that after one hour there is an equal probability of one atom either decaying or not decaying. If the atom decays, a device smashes a vial of poisonous gas, killing the cat. However, until the box is opened and the atom’s wave function collapses, the atom’s wave function is in a superposition of two states: decay and non-decay. Thus, the cat is in a superposition of two states: alive and dead. Schrödinger thought this outcome "quite ridiculous," and when and how the fate of the cat is determined has been a subject of much debate among physicists.

The key to Schrödinger's philosophy of physics (especially quantum mechanics) is contained in a letter to Arthur Eddington of March 22, 1940. There, Schrödinger insists that Ernst Mach's radical empiricism and Ludwig Boltzmann's taste for rational "pictures" are not mutually exclusive strategies. He regarded Mach's empiricism as a good guide to tabula rasa whenever unwarranted old intellectual constructs hinder a proper understanding of new physical phenomena. But this is only the first step of research. Boltzmann's urge to picture must be the second step. Indeed, "forming absolutely clear, almost naively clear and detailed "pictures" allows one "to be quite sure of avoiding contradictory assumptions."

Schrödinger used both methods. He was clearly inspired by Mach's method when he criticized vehemently the old-fashioned concept of "particle" construed as a small permanent material body. He formulated his criticism as early as 1913, when he first heard of Bohr's model of the atom, and then refined it throughout his career. According to Schrödinger, the concept of an object is constructed out of actual observations complemented with appropriately selected virtual observations. But if the interpolation of arbitrarily numerous virtual observations is not allowed by the most advanced predictive theory, then the very process of construction collapses, and the corresponding object cannot be said to exist. For elementary particles, "Observations are to be regarded as discrete, disconnected events. Between them there are gaps which we cannot fill in." We cannot fill them in according to a trajector pattern, because of Heisenberg's uncertainty relations. But if there is no trajectory, the discrete events cannot be tied up into a spatio-temporal continuant. Therefore, the idea that these scattered events reveal some permanent being is a sort of kinetic illusion: particles do not exist.

After this Machian preliminary move, however, Schrödinger activated the Boltzmannian side of his philosophy of physics. To him, without a precise picture, scientific thought is threatened with ambiguity. Yet the picture must not be taken as mere mimicry of "things out there." It is nothing more than the most efficient mental tool we have, with no ontological implications. This is the status Schrödinger ascribed to his wave function in the 1950s, after having apparently held a naive realist belief in the existence of ψ-waves in 1926. His mature view of wave functions was expressed in Science and Humanism: "We do give a complete description, continuous in space and time … a description of something. But we do not claim that this 'something' is the observed or observable facts; and still less do we claim that we thus describe what nature … really is." Yet the description, or picture, must be taken seriously in view of its epistemological value. Its continuous evolution according to the Schrödinger equation and the entanglement between wave functions must be allowed to develop throughout without any sudden "reduction of the state." The only constraint to be exerted on this picture is that it must have some connection with experimentally observable events. But to secure this connection, it is sufficient to use either a rule about expectation values of observables or Born's probabilistic rule: no reduction, no "quantum jump," no collapse of the wave packet, is needed. This is Schrödinger's "solution" (or rather "dissolution") of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger was usually careful to separate his metaphysics from his scientific work. He held that Western science arose from the act of "objectivation" - the act of withdrawing oneself from the domain under study. By this objectivation, we push aside color, pain, esthetic judgment, and ethical values, and restrict our interest to that which is common to all: numbers and structures. But, Schrödinger argues, there is no real duality between ourselves and the objects we have thus posited. Furthermore, our personal selves are identical with the one all-comprehending universal self. Whereas science is only concerned with the relations between objectified entities, metaphysics ventures to say something about the one that comes before any objectification has taken place. This nondualist conception (which Schrödinger called the "identity theory") was overtly borrowed from the Indian Advaita Vedânta and was remarkably similar to Schopenhauer's earlier views. The arguments Schrödinger presents in favor of this view are as follows: (I) The truth of the "identity theory" is somehow directly experienced; (II) The "identity theory" provides us with a coherent picture of the world as a whole, including the vexing mind-body problem; and (III) The "identity theory" has a potentially high ethical value, because it cuts egocentrism at its root. The only point of contact between Schrödinger's metaphysics and philosophy of physics is negative. In Mind and Matter, Schrödinger sharply criticized Heisenberg's suggestion that quantum mechanics had weakened the Cartesian dichotomy between res cogitans and res extensa. After all, Schrödinger wrote, "Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist."

Quotations: "Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion."

"Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."

"God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is."

"I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us."

"Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears."

"Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life," but not so mind."

Membership

• 

  Erwin Schrödinger was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1949.

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

• 

  Pontifical Academy of Sciences , Vatican City

Personality

Of all the physicists of his generation, Schrödinger stands out because of his extraordinary intellectual versatility. He was at home in the philosophy and literature of all the Western languages, and his popular scientific writing in English, which he had learned as a child, is among the best of its kind. His study of ancient Greek science and philosophy, summarized in his Nature and the Greeks (1954), gave him both an admiration for the Greek invention of the scientific view of the world and skepticism toward the relevance of science as a unique tool with which to unravel the ultimate mysteries of human existence.

Quotes from others about the person

• "You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality - if only one is honest." - Albert Einstein in a letter to Schrödinger (1950)
  
  "In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes." - Walter J. Moore

Interests

• theater, art, poetry

• Writers

  Franz Grillparzer

Connections

On 6 April 1920, Schrödinger was married to Annemarie (Anny) Bertel. Schrödinger had an unconventional personal life. When he migrated to Ireland in 1938, he asked for visas for himself, his wife, and also his mistress, Mrs. Hilde March. He and his wife had no children, but Schrödinger fathered two children by two different women while living in Dublin.

Father:

Rudolf Schrödinger

Mother:

Emily Bauer

Wife:

Annemarie (Anny) Bertel

Mistress:

Hilde March

Friend:

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger regularly corresponded.

Doctoral advisor:

Friedrich Hasenöhrl

References

• Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
  2012
• Schrödinger: Life and Thought
  1989
• A Life of Erwin Schrödinger
  1994
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries
  1995