Erwin

Schrdinger

(1887 1961)
The task is not so much to see what no-one has yet seen, but to think
what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

Early life
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrdinger was born
in 1887 in Erdberg, Vienna to Rudolf Schrdinger, a
linoleum factory owner & botanist, and Georgine
Emilia Brenda, daughter of Alexander Bauer (a
Professor of Chemistry).

Vienna

Early life
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrdinger was born in
1887 in Erdberg, Vienna to Rudolf Schrdinger, a
linoleum factory owner & botanist, and Georgine
Emilia Brenda, daughter of Alexander Bauer (a
Professor of Chemistry).
The young Schrdinger received private lessons from
a tutor at home until the age of ten.
He then attended Akademisches Gymnasium until his
graduation in 1906.
From 1906 to 1910 he was a student at the University
of Vienna, during which time he came under the
strong influence of Fritz Hasenhrl, who was
Boltzmann's successor.
On 20 May 1910, Schrdinger was awarded his
doctorate for the dissertation On the conduction of
electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air. He
then became assistant to Franz Exner- an important
pioneer of modern physics in Austria at the time.

Academic Life
In 1914, Schrodinger participated in the war effort as part of the Austrian
Fortress Artillery. In 1920, he took up an academic position as assistant to Max
Wien, followed by positions at Stuttgart (extraordinary professor), Breslau
(ordinary professor), and at the University of Zurich (replacing von Laue)
where he settled for six years. Schrdinger, in his autobiography Meine
Leben, Meine Weltansicht, described Wien as moderately anti-semetic.
His papers at this time dealt with specific heats of solids, with problems of
thermodynamics (he was greatly interested in Boltzmann's probability theory)
and of atomic spectra; in addition, he indulged in physiological studies of
colour (as a result of his contacts with Kohlrausch and Exner, and of
Helmholtz's lectures).
It was during his stay at the University of Vienna that he became interested in
eigenvalue problems and especially in their application to the new quantum
theory.

Academic life
His great discovery, Schrdinger's wave
equation, was made in the first half of 1926. It
came as a result of his dissatisfaction with the
quantum condition in Bohr's orbit theory and
his belief that atomic spectra should really be
determined by some kind of eigenvalue
problem.
He became convinced that the energies of a
confined particle could be determined as
eigenvalue solutions to a particular
eigenfunction, a probabilistic wave function.
He published his work in Annalen der Physik
(the same publication that Einstein used to
publish his theories of relativity) under the
very imaginative title, Quantisation as an
eigenvalue problem.
For this work he shared the Nobel Prize in
1933 with Paul Dirac for the discovery of new
productive forms of atomic theory.

Academic life
His great discovery, Schrdinger's wave equation, is below. H-bar is Plancks
constant, m is the mass of the particle, Psi is the wave function, V(x) is the
potential energy and E is the particles energy. This formulation of quantum
mechanics has the form of an eigenvalue problem.
The solution of the Schrodinger Equation (the eigenvalues) gives the allowed
energy levels (or orbitals surrounding a nucleus).

V
(
x
)

2
2m dx
2

Schrodingers cat
After consultation with Einstein, Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment
in which he highlighted the apparent inconsistencies between the so-called
Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and the reality of
macroscopic measurements.
He proposed that a cat be placed in a sealed box. The release of a poison is
then subject to the probabilistic decay of a radioactive isotope. If the isotope
decays, the poison is released. If no decay occurs, the poison is not released.
The result is that the cat is in a superposition of states between being dead,
and being alive. This is very unintuitive.

His Dublin life

In 1940, Schrodinger was asked by Eamonn
deValera (who had been a Mathematics teacher
at Blackrock College) to help establish the
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, on
Merrion Square.
He became Director of the School of
Theoretical Physics and remained in Ireland for
17 years until his retirement in 1955. During this
time he became a naturalised Irish citizen.
During his time at the Institute he wrote about
fifty further publications on various topics
including his attempt at formulating a unified
field theory.
After retiring at the ripe old age of 68, he
returned to Vienna

What is life?
In 1944, Schrodinger wrote a book that was to change the course of scientific
endeavour in the biological sciences.
He published his book, What is life?, with a view to explaining the
characteristics of life and speculating on the mechanism for the storage of
biological information.
Both James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in
1953, later cited Schrodingers book as their inspiration in searching for the
information transfer mechanism.
Schrodinger also delivered a series of lectures with the same title in what is
now the Schrodinger Lecture Theatre in Trinity College a year before the book
was published.
It was from this platform that he introduced the idea of negative entropy or
negentropy, which means that life may be associated with a local decrease in
entropy (organisation of the organism) which is offset by borrowing entropy
from the surroundings (food).

Schrodingers
Other equation

Personal life
Despite being one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century, Schrodinger had
a more unusual approach to his personal life.
Schrodinger had married Annemarie Bertel in 1920.
It has been widely reported (mostly by Cormac McGuinness) that Schrodinger
had a eureka moment when he was holidaying in the Alps with one of his
mistresses in which he saw his famous Schrodinger Equation flash before his
eyes.
Schrodinger requested that Arthur March become his assistant while he was
working in Oxford because Schrodinger was in love with Marchs wife, Hilde.
Schrodinger was offered a teaching position at Princeton but after extensive
negotiations he declined the position. It is thought that Princeton would not
house him with his wife and his mistress. Instead, he went to DUBLIN, to the
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, who obligingly provided said housing
arrangement.
While in Ireland, Schrodinger also fathered two children, by two different
women.
.

Schrodingers legacy
Schrodinger died on January 4th, 1961, of
tuberculosis at the age of 73, in his native
Austria.
He was survived by his widow, Anny (his
original wife), his various misstresses and
numerous children.
The huge Schrodinger Crater, on the far side of
the moon, was named after him by the IAU
(International Astronomical Union).
The Erwin Schrodinger International Institute
for Mathematical Physics was established in
Vienna in 1993.

Thats a psi, by the way!

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+ ANY QUESTIONS

By Catherine McGinty and Simon Hall

stop

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