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 world of science becomes so horribly objective that there is no room left for the mind and its immediate sensations.
The theory of relativity is perhaps the prime example of the power of speculative thought.
The concept of a particle is an idealization which we have borrowed from macroscopic experience.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.
The environment that a species lives in is largely created by the species itself.
The unfolding of life is a process of increasing complexity and order.
The boundary between the self and the non-self is not sharp.
The feeling of having only one identity is an illusion.
The great revelation of quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature.
The aim of science is to construct a world which is independent of the individual observer.
Contemporaries of Erwin Schrödinger
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961).