Erwin Schrödinger
Developed wave equation for quantum mechanics
Most quoted
"One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. Imagine an experiment that will not be carried out until the year 2000, in which a cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): at the heart of 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 which 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."
— from Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik, 1935
"The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really close to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously."
— from Mind and Matter
"This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in a single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula. Tat tvam asi—this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, above and below, I am this entire world.’"
— from My View of the World
All quotes by Erwin Schrödinger (550)
If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.
The essential of the new system is that it does not try to describe and account for the processes of nature in the old familiar way; it does not try to imagine the processes at all.
A careful analysis makes Quantum Theory in its present form fundamentally incomprehensible.
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
The laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated... without recourse to the concept of consciousness.
Matter and radiation will be two different aspects of the same thing.
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient.
The objective world has only one aspect, but the subjective world has many.
We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.
The scientific truth is not the whole truth.
Life is a physical process that can be described in terms of the laws of physics.
The orderliness of matter and the existence of life require a process that maintains order by creating disorder elsewhere.
The hereditary substance must possess a structure that is finely built up from a large number of parts.
It seems likely that the chromosomes carry the hereditary code in some kind of code-script.
The most diverse living beings agree in that the essential part of their substance is a protein.
Living matter evades the decay to equilibrium.
The device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
The sun is the source of negative entropy.
Every process is accompanied by an increase in entropy.
Consciousness is the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion.
Contemporaries of Erwin Schrödinger
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961).