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Erwin Schrodinger
(1887-1961)
Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of
matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the
1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with the British physicist P.A.M. Dirac.
Schrodinger 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. He saw military service in World War I and
then went to the University of Zurich in 1921, where he remained for
the next six years. There, in a six-month period in 1926, at the age
of 39, a remarkably late age for original work by theoretical physicists,
he 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, Schrodinger introduced a theory describing the behaviour
of such a system by a wave equation that is now known as the Schrodinger
equation. The solutions to Schrodinger'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 Schrodinger 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.)
In 1927 Schrodinger 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.
He remained at the university until 1933, at which time he reached the
decision that he could no longer live in a country in which the persecution
of Jews had become a national policy. 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, founded under the influence of Premier Eamon de Valera, who
had been a mathematician before turning to politics. Schrodinger remained
in Ireland for the next 15 years, doing research both in physics and
in the philosophy and history of science. 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. Although much of
what Schrodinger had to say in this book has been modified and amplified
by later developments in molecular biology, his book remains one of
the most useful and profound introductions to the subject. In 1956 Schrodinger
retired and returned to Vienna as professor emeritus at the university.
Assessment.
Of all of the physicists of his generation, Schrodinger stands out because
of his extraordinary intellectual versatility. He was at home in the
philosophy and literature of all of 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 a skepticism
toward the relevance of science as a unique tool with which to unravel
the ultimate mysteries of human existence. Schrodinger's own metaphysical
outlook, as expressed in his last book, Meine Weltansicht (1961; My
View of the World), closely paralleled the mysticism of the Vedanta.
Because of his exceptional gifts, Schrodinger 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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
William T. Scott, Erwin Schrodinger: An Introduction to His Writings
(1967), is a good critical study of Schrodinger and his works. Schrodinger's
life and career are chronicled in Walter Moore, Schrodinger: Life and
Thought (1989), also published in an abridged version, A Life of Erwin
Schrodinger (1994). C.W. Kilmister (ed.), Schrodinger: Centenary Celebration
of a Polymath (1987), a set of papers, explores Schrodinger's scientific
legacy.
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