Erwin Schrödinger

Overview

Erwin Schrödinger, working in Zurich in 1926, produced an equation describing how a quantum system's wave function changes over time. It gave the hydrogen spectrum correctly and, unlike Heisenberg's version published a year earlier, used mathematics physicists already knew, which is why it became the form the subject is taught and calculated in. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 with Dirac. He was unhappy with the probabilistic reading of the wave function and devised the cat thought experiment in 1935 to show how strange the theory becomes when a quantum superposition is coupled to an everyday object. He left Austria after 1938 and spent much of his later career in Dublin. What Is Life?, a short book from his lectures there, is the most accessible thing he wrote and influenced the founding of molecular biology.

Where to start reading

• Quantisation as a Problem of Proper Values 1926

  The series of papers introducing the wave equation and applying it to the hydrogen atom.

• What Is Life? 1944

  A short book asking how the stability of heredity is compatible with physics, and proposing that genetic information is carried in an aperiodic crystal.

Part of

• Quantum mechanics

Sources

1. Erwin Schrödinger Nobel Prize
2. Schrödinger equation English Wikipedia
3. Erwin Schrödinger Britannica