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)
The urge to know is as old as mankind.
What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
The wave function itself has no real physical significance, it is only a mathematical tool.
The laws of physics are the rules of the game, but the game itself is something else.
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
The picture of the world as a four-dimensional space-time continuum is a beautiful and consistent one.
The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
The first step is to recognize that all knowledge is based on perception.
The scientist subconsciously almost invariably, imputes the idea of a creator to the explanation of natural phenomena.
We have to give up the idea of a direct pictorial representation of reality.
The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it.
The world is not a collection of things, but a web of relations.
The discovery of the quantum of action shows us not only the natural limits of classical physics, but forces us to adopt a new mode of thought.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that physics is a form of insight and as such it is a form of poetry.
The desire to find a unified theory is a kind of religion.
The wave equation is not a description of an actual wave in three-dimensional space; it is an abstract construction.
The statistical view of nature is not the final one.
The history of science shows that a correct hypothesis often seems absurd at first.
The path to the good is the path of the beautiful.
The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.
Contemporaries of Erwin Schrödinger
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961).