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Schrödinger Erwin (1887-1961)
Copyright: IMAGNO/Austrian Archives
Erwin Schrödinger was born on 12 August 1887 in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, an oilcloth trader. Schrödinger entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and obtained his doctorate in 1910, upon which he accepted a research post at the university's Second Physics Institute. From 1920/21 he taught in Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau before accepting a post at the Zurich University.
There he produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. 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.
In 1935, Schrödinger proposed a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat. In it he attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems.
To illustrate this principle, he described a situation whereby a cat is locked in a box with a canister of poison gas. The release of this gas is controlled by the decay of a radioactive atom - but it is impossible to predict whether this atom will actually decay or not within a specified time. The cat remains in an indeterminate state, both alive and dead, until someone actually opens the box and looks inside.
In 1927 Schrödinger accepted an invitation to succeed Max Planck, the inventor of the quantum hypothesis, at the University of Berlin, and he joined an extremely distinguished faculty that included Albert Einstein. In 1933 Schrödinger was forced to leave Germany because of Nazi threats – the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his contributions to atomic theory. He then began a seven-year odyssey that took him to Austria, Great Britain, Belgium, the Pontifical Academy of Science in Rome, and—finally in 1940—the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
During this period he wrote "What Is Life?" (1944), an attempt to show how quantum physics can be used to explain the stability of genetic structure.
In 1956 Schrödinger retired and returned to Vienna as professor emeritus at the university. The last two years of his life Schrödinger spent in the Tirolean town of Alpbach where he died on 4 January 1961.
Erwin Schrödinger
There he produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. 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.
In 1935, Schrödinger proposed a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat. In it he attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems.
To illustrate this principle, he described a situation whereby a cat is locked in a box with a canister of poison gas. The release of this gas is controlled by the decay of a radioactive atom - but it is impossible to predict whether this atom will actually decay or not within a specified time. The cat remains in an indeterminate state, both alive and dead, until someone actually opens the box and looks inside.
In 1927 Schrödinger accepted an invitation to succeed Max Planck, the inventor of the quantum hypothesis, at the University of Berlin, and he joined an extremely distinguished faculty that included Albert Einstein. In 1933 Schrödinger was forced to leave Germany because of Nazi threats – the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his contributions to atomic theory. He then began a seven-year odyssey that took him to Austria, Great Britain, Belgium, the Pontifical Academy of Science in Rome, and—finally in 1940—the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
During this period he wrote "What Is Life?" (1944), an attempt to show how quantum physics can be used to explain the stability of genetic structure.
In 1956 Schrödinger retired and returned to Vienna as professor emeritus at the university. The last two years of his life Schrödinger spent in the Tirolean town of Alpbach where he died on 4 January 1961.
Erwin Schrödinger
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