Erwin Schrodinger — "The great difficulty for our contemporary way of thinking is that we must recogn…"
The great difficulty for our contemporary way of thinking is that we must recognize the identity of the experiencing and the experienced subject.
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More from Erwin Schrodinger
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."
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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.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
We face a deep conceptual problem: the person doing the observing and the thing being observed are ultimately the same entity. The mind studying reality is itself part of that reality. Modern science struggles to separate the scientist from the science, the consciousness examining the world from the world being examined. This unity resists our habit of treating the observer as neutral and detached.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger, who formulated wave mechanics and the famous cat thought experiment, wrestled throughout his career with consciousness and quantum observation. His book 'What is Life?' and 'Mind and Matter' show his lifelong conviction that physics must eventually account for the observer. His wave function collapse problem directly implicates the observer, making this question professionally unavoidable for him.
The era
Writing amid quantum mechanics' revolutionary 1920s–1950s upheaval, Schrödinger saw classical objectivity collapse. The Copenhagen interpretation made the observer central to measurement, scandalizing physicists trained on detached Newtonian science. Simultaneously, existentialism and phenomenology in philosophy were questioning the subject-object divide. Western thought faced an unprecedented crisis: science's most successful theory seemed to demand that consciousness be taken seriously.
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