This book describes the many aspects of the life and scientific work of Erwin Schrödinger, who, perhaps more than anyone else, serves to represent the whole of modern physics. The contributions to the book are from many hands, and so it seemed useful to me to precede them with a short note giving an uncontroversial account of his life which will serve as a framework into which they can be fitted. Such a collection as this still leaves out many aspects of Schrödinger's thought, for it considers his philosophy only in passing, his poetry not at all and ignores his wide and deep interest in sculpture and painting and in the classics. Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887, and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service, and again after the war. Some short term appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zürich in 1921. He was already treating a wide range of topics, but concentrating on atomic theory, for the old quantum theory had now entered on its heroic phase of final collapse. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zürich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.
This book describes the many aspects of the life and scientific work of Erwin Schrödinger, who, perhaps more than anyone else, serves to represent the whole of modern physics. The contributions to the book are from many hands, and so it seemed useful to me to precede them with a short note giving an uncontroversial account of his life which will serve as a framework into which they can be fitted. Such a collection as this still leaves out many aspects of Schrödinger's thought, for it considers his philosophy only in passing, his poetry not at all and ignores his wide and deep interest in sculpture and painting and in the classics. Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887, and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service, and again after the war. Some short term appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zürich in 1921. He was already treating a wide range of topics, but concentrating on atomic theory, for the old quantum theory had now entered on its heroic phase of final collapse. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zürich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.
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 eveny. Much later, in 1963, Max Born wrote: ‘I am convinced that theoretical physics is tempted to sacrifice scientific research to devote his life to philosophical stud 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.’
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 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.
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.
Quantum theory originated from the constant introduced by Max Planck in his radiation law in 1900. Later Niels Bohr used the idea of matter waves for the explanation of atomic spectra. Heisenberg gave an algebraic treatment, called matrix mechanics, while Erwin Schrödinger formulated his wave mechanics. He published the first of four papers containing the celebrated equation in the Annalen der Physik in 1927, and showed that the atomic spectra resulted from solving his wave equation for the vibrational states. Schrödinger moved from Zürich to Berlin as Planck’s successor. In the year 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Dirac. With Hitler’s coming to power, however, Schrödinger was outraged and decided to leave Germany to take up a fellowship in Oxford. In 1934 he was offered a permanent position at Princeton University, but he did not accept it. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin in 1938, where he stayed till his retirement in 1955.
Erwin Schro¨dinger was born in Vienna in 1887, and, by 1927, principally as a result of his celebrated discovery of wave mechanics, he was recognized as one of the most outstanding physicists of his time. In that year he succeeded Max Planck in the prestigious chair of theoretical physics in the University of Berlin and it seemed certain that he would spend the rest of his career there, but the unsettled nature of European politics in the 1930s and 1940s resulted in him instead spending the years 1939 to 1956 in Dublin, where he was Director of the School of Theoretical Physics in the Institute for Advanced Studies from its foundation in 1940.