Erwin Schrodinger — "The world is a dream, but it is a dream that we can shape."
The world is a dream, but it is a dream that we can shape.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Erwin Schrodinger
"The world is a symphony, and we are the instruments."
"I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, ever…"
"What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
"The world is not something that exists independently of us. It is something that we create."
"If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men —…"
About Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961)
Austrian physicist who shared the 1933 Nobel for the wave equation that bears his name and the famous cat thought-experiment. Closely associated with Werner Heisenberg (matrix-mechanics rival who reached the same physics by different math) and Albert Einstein (his pen-pal on quantum interpretation). For an intellectual contrast, see Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and architect of the Copenhagen interpretation — Schrödinger's cat thought-experiment was specifically designed to ridicule Bohr's 'observer-dependent reality' reading of quantum mechanics — Schrödinger thought the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd; the cat was meant as reductio ad absurdum.
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Reality isn't fixed or objectively solid — it's fluid, shaped by perception and active participation. The quote rejects both rigid materialism, which treats the world as immovably concrete, and passive fatalism, which treats it as beyond our influence. Instead, it positions humans as co-creators of experience. The 'dream' isn't dismissive of reality but describes its malleable, constructed nature — something we encounter, interpret, and genuinely transform through thought and deliberate action.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger was steeped in Vedanta philosophy, which frames reality as maya — a layered illusion shaped by consciousness. His wave equation described particles not as fixed objects but as probability distributions, making reality indeterminate until observed. His cat paradox dramatized this directly: a system exists in superposition until measurement collapses it. His book 'My View of the World' explicitly argued that mind and matter aren't separate, and that consciousness participates in constructing what we call reality.
The era
Schrödinger worked during the quantum revolution of the 1920s–1940s, when classical physics' clockwork certainty collapsed entirely. The Copenhagen interpretation suggested particles hold no definite state until measured — reality itself was contested. Meanwhile, two World Wars demonstrated catastrophically that human choices reshape civilization. The tension between determinism and agency was live and urgent. Science was rewriting what 'real' meant, while history proved that collective human will could remake — or unmake — the world.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].