Erwin Schrodinger

Erwin Schrodinger was an avid researcher and formulated the wave theory in quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to statistical mechanics, theoretical biology, general relativity and cosmology. He also took a keen interest in philosophy, and wrote a book entitled “What is life?”, in which he looks at the problem of genetics.

Erwin Schrodinger was born on 12th August 1887. He was born in Austria to parents who were quite well educated, and he also had links with the British through his mother. His theory of wave mechanics is now one of the anchor points of Quantum Mechanics. He also sought a theory of everything, which he called the Unified Field Theory. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in the year 1933 for his work on wave mechanics.

However, he remains well known in the general community not for his field equations, but for his thought experiment dubbed “the Schrodinger’s cat”, which he devised in 1935. In this thought experiment, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. This may seem counter-intuitive, but consider this: Everything is both a particle and a wave, two fundamentally different things, at the same time. This has been proved by experimental analysis and is called the “Wave-particle duality.” This is what Schrodinger himself said about the Cat:

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

Schrodinger remains to this day, one of the most inspirational scientists to have ever lived.