Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961)
Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian physicist and Nobel laureate who played an important role in the development of quantum physics. He is perhaps best known for the thought experiment known as "Schrodinger's Cat."
Schrodinger published (1926) four papers that laid the foundation of the wave-mechanics approach to quantum theory and set forth his now-famous wave equation. Schrodinger earned a doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1910. He succeeded (1927) Max Planck in the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin but left Germany in 1933 because of Nazi threats--the same year he shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Paul Dirac for his contributions to atomic theory. In 1939 he joined the newly formed Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. There he continued his studies of the application and statistical interpretation of wave mechanics, the mathematical character of the new statistics, and the relationship of this statistics to statistical thermodynamics. He also worked on problems of general relativity and cosmology and on a unified field theory. Late in his life Schrodinger studied the foundations of physics and their implications for philosophy.
Erwin Schrodinger's father Rudolf Schrodinger ran a small linoleum factory which he had inherited from his own father. Erwin's grandmother, Emily Bauer, was half English, this side of the family coning from Leamington Spa, and half Austrian with her father coming from Vienna. Schrodinger learnt 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 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.
Schrodinger graduated in 1906 and, in that year, entered the University of Vienna. 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 Hasenohrl's lectures on theoretical physics which had the greatest influence on Schrodinger. In mathematics he was taught calculus and algebra by Franz Mertens, function theory, differential equations and mathematical statistics by Wilhelm Wirtinger (who he found uninspiring as a lecturer). He also studied projective geometry, algebraic curves and continuous groups in lectures by Gustav Kohn.
On 20 May 1910, Schrodinger was awarded his doctorate with a doctoral dissertation On the conduction of electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air. After this he undertook voluntary military service in the fortress artillery. Then he was appointed to an assistantship at Vienna but, rather surprisingly, in experimental physics rather than theoretical physics. He later said that his experiences conducting experiments proved an invaluable asset to his theoretical work since it gave him a practical philosophical framework in which to set his theoretical ideas.
In 1914, Erwin Schrodinger achieved Habilitation Between 1914-18, he was involved in war participation (Gorz, Duino, Sistiana, Prosecco, Vienna). In 1920 April 6, Schrodinger married Annemarie Bertel. In 1920, he became the assistant to Max Wien, in Jena. In 1920, Sept. he attained the position of a. o. Prof. (Ausserordentlicher Professor), roughly equivalent to Reader (UK) or associate professor (US)), in Stuttgart. In 1921, he attained the o. Prof. (Ordentlicher Professor, i.e. full professor), in Breslau (presently Wroclaw, Poland)
In 1914 Schrodinger's first important paper was published developing ideas of Boltzmann. However, with the outbreak of World War I, Schrodinger received orders to take up duty on the Italian border. His time of active service was not useless as far as research was concerned and he continued his theoretical work, submitting another paper from his position on the Italian front. In 1915 he was transferred to duty in Hungary and from there he submitted further work for publication. After being sent back to the Italian front, Schrodinger received a citation for outstanding service commanding a battery during a battle.
In 1922, he went to the Zurich University. In 1926, Schrodinger published in the Annalen der Physik the paper "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" (Quantisation as an Eigenvalue Problem) over wave mechanics and what is now known as the Schrodinger equation. In 1927, he followed Max Planck in Berlin to the Humboldt-University. In 1933, however, Schrodinger decided to leave Germany; he disliked the Nazi's anti-semitism. He became the Fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Soon after he arrived, he received the Nobel Prize together with Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. His position at Oxford did not work out, it seems that his unconventional personal life (Schrodinger lived with two women) was not considered acceptable. In 1934, Schrodinger lectured at Princeton University and was offered a permanent position but did not accept it. Again, his wish to set up house with his wife and his mistress may have been a problem. There was also a possibility of his being offered a position at the University of Edinburgh but there were visa delays and in the end he returned, in 1936 to University Graz, Austria.
In 1935 Schrodinger published a three-part essay on The present situation in quantum mechanics in which his famous Schrodinger's cat paradox appears. He argued that in a quantum system, particles are in an indeterminate state until they are actually observed.
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 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 1938, after Hitler occupied Austria, he had problems due to leaving Germany in 1933 and his known opposition to Nazism. He issued a statement recanting this opposition, something he later regreted and for which he personally apologised to Einstein. However, this did not fully appease the new dispensation and he was dismissed from his job for political unreliability. He suffered harassment and was told not to leave the country. He and his wife fled to Italy. From there he went to visiting positions in Oxford and in the University of Ghent. In 1940 he was asked to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. He became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics and remained there for 17 years. He wrote about 50 further publications on various topics. These were attempts towards a unified field theory.
In 1956, he returned to Vienna. At an important lecture during the World Power Conference he refused to speak on nuclear energy because of his scepticism about it (he gave a philosophical lecture instead).
In 1961, Schrodinger died in Vienna at the age of 73 (due to tuberculosis). He left a widow, Anny. He was buried in Alpbach (Austria).