Erwin Schrödinger, co-discoverer of quantum mechanics, was born to middle-class, intellectual parents in Vienna in 1887. His father, who owned a linoleum factory, was an enthusiastic amateur botanist. His grandfather on his mother’s side was a chemist and professor at the Polytechnicum (the technical university) in Vienna. Erwin, an only child surrounded by adoring adult women (mostly maiden aunts), had a happy upbringing. He showed early talent at mathematics and was the most promising pupil at his Gymnasium. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Erwin Schrödinger, co-discoverer of quantum mechanics, was born to middle-class, intellectual parents in Vienna in 1887. His father, who owned a linoleum factory, was an enthusiastic amateur botanist. His grandfather on his mother’s side was a chemist and professor at the Polytechnicum (the technical university) in Vienna. Erwin, an only child surrounded by adoring adult women (mostly maiden aunts), had a happy upbringing. He showed early talent at mathematics and was the most promising pupil at his Gymnasium. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Abstract Erwin Schrödinger was born on 12 August 1887 in Vienna. His father was a Viennese and came from a very cultured family. The ancestors of his mother came from England which explains why Schrodinger spoke and wrote a practically flawless English. The relationship between father and son was excellent. To the growing boy the father was friend and teacher and he never tired of answering the inquisitive questions which the bright and interested boy produced in plenty. His elementary education was private and was carried out at home. At the age of 11 he entered the Akademische Gymnasium, a first-class grammar school which emphasized classical education, Latin and Greek. In spite of his main interest in mathematics and physics he loved the old languages as well as classical German and foreign poetry, and he was an addict of the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. He entered the University of Vienna in 1906. His great and beloved teacher there was F. Hasenohrl who had just succeeded to the chair of Boltzmann and who considered it his privilege and duty to continue the work of this great theoretical physicist. Hasenohrl was a very gifted physicist indeed and probably he would have been capable of great achievements had he not been killed in 1916 serving at the Italian front. He exercised a profound and lasting influence on the student Schrodinger. When much later Schrodinger received the Nobel Prize he said: ‘had Hasenohrl not been killed so young he would now be here in my place.’ Schrodinger himself served during the war as an artillery officer in Italy. From 1910 onwards his first publications began to appear. They were concerned with statistical problems, dielectrics, magnetism, and so on. Later on he also worked on X-ray diffraction in lattices, following the great discovery of von Laue in 1912.
Werner Heisenberg, co-discoverer of quantum mechanics, was born on December 5, 1901, in Würzburg, Germany, the second son in a scholarly family. His father, August Heisenberg, initially taught at a gymnasium but after his Habilitation was appointed Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Munich in 1911. Werner’s teachers in Munich made observations about the 10-year-old which seem prescient today (but which probably characterize bright children everywhere): “He has an eye for what is essential and never gets lost in details…great interest and thoroughness, and ambition.” Heisenberg excelled over the other boys at skiing and chess. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
A review of The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Volume 5; Erwin Schrödinger and the Rise of Wave Mechanics. Part 1 Schrödinger in Vienna and Zurich 1887–1925, and Part 2 The Creation of Wave Mechanics; Early Response and Applications. By Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg. (Springer, 1987.) Part 1 [Pp. xviii+336.] £32·40 ISBN 3540 96284 0. Part 2 [Pp. 367–980]. £48·50. ISBN 3540 96377 4. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) on the centenary of his birth.
When the Great War began in August, 1914, Erwin schrödinger at the age of twenty-seven was a Privatdozent at Vienna University, at the outset of a promising career in physics. He served throughout the war as a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery, first on the Italian front and later assigned to the imperial meteorology department in Vienna. On October 7,1915, his revered professor of theoretical physics, Fritz Hasenöhrl, was killed by a grenade in an Italian attack on Mount Plaut in the South Tirol. Early in 1918, schrödinger received word that he was being seriously considered for the position of Professor Extraordinarius [associate professor] in theoretical physics at the University of Czernowitz. ‘I made up my mind to lecture there on honest theoretical physics, first of all according to the pattern of the splendid lectures of my beloved teacher Fritz Hasenöhrl, fallen in the war, but besides to concern myself with philosophy, deeply immersed as I then was in the writings of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Mach, Richard Semon, and Richard Avenarius. My good angel intervened, since soon Czernowitz no longer belonged to us. So nothing came of it. I had to stick to theoretical physics, and, to my astonishment, something occasionally emerged from it.’ Even on active duty, schrödinger found time to read deeply in philosophy, and indeed it was the only thing that kept him from despair during the long years of senseless killing and destruction. A serious interest in philosophy was not unusual among German and Austrian physicists, but with schrödinger at that time it was so important that he was even tempted to sacrifice scientific research to devote his life to philosophical study. Much later, in 1963, Max Born wrote: ‘I am convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics). It has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity), which are applicable far beyond physics.’ By his discovery of wave mechanics, Erwin schrödinger contributed in a major way to this revolutionary change in our view of the world [ Weltanschauunung ].
Abstract Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was hailed as a mathematical and scientific genius from the beginning of his student years in Vienna. He was one of the small band of theoretical physicists who wrought a revolution in the perception of matter and the Universe in the years just before and after the First World War. Schrodinger’s most celebrated monument is the invention of wave mechanics, a description of the behaviour of fundamental particles, which he, with others, later showed to be the obverse of quantum mechanics. In 1927, he was elected, as successor to Max Planck, to a professorial chair at Berlin University, then the Mecca of theoretical physics. There he became closely associated with Albert Einstein, a friendship that endured intermittently, though with stormy vicissitudes, until a few years before Einstein’s death in 1955.
The Bohr-Einstein debate, the most interesting intellectual contest in science of this century, began in the late afternoon of October 24,1927, at the Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels, Belgium. 50 (Einstein had not attended the meeting in Como a month before, at which Bohr first introduced complementarity.) The theorists Bohr, Born, de Broglie, Brillouin, Dirac, Einstein, Ehrenfest, Heisenberg, Pauli, Planck, and Schrödinger were in attendance, as well as the experimentalists Bragg, Compton, Madame Curie, and Debye. The eminent Dutch theorist H.A. Lorentz, the grandfather of relativity (after whom the theory’s space-time transformations were named), chaired the sessions. The organizers had chosen “Electrons and Photons” as the official title of the conference, but a better one might have been: “Quantum Mechanics: What Does it Mean?” As Einstein’s opinion had become widely known, fireworks were expected. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.