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 paradoxes of quantum mechanics are not to be resolved by abandoning the theory.
The cat is both dead and alive until observed.
Superposition is the key to quantum weirdness.
The measurement problem is the heart of quantum mechanics.
Reality depends on the observer.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
From the standpoint of daily life, it is almost a truth that the only sins for which one cannot be pardoned are philosophical sins.
The world is a drama staged in the mind.
We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
The eternal is not beyond time but within it.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Life finds a way to organize itself against entropy.
The molecule that constitutes the genetic material must be an aperiodic crystal.
Negative entropy or negentropy is the code name for order.
The organism feeds on negative entropy.
Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may put it, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death.
It can only keep aloof from it, i.e., alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy.
What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.
Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
Contemporaries of Erwin Schrödinger
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961).