If we were to pursue the idea to its logical conclusion, we would have to assume that every thought, every feeling, every sensation is somehow connected with an elementary process in the brain, with a single quantum jump.
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"I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'."
"The universe is a grand illusion. But it is a very persistent one."
"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 —…"
"The world is full of wonders, and it is our task to explore them."
"If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all."
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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Every mental event—a thought, an emotion, a sensation—might ultimately trace back to a single quantum jump in the brain. Rather than consciousness emerging purely from classical chemistry, the mind could be grounded in discrete quantum transitions. Our richest inner experiences might be expressions of the same probabilistic, discontinuous events governing subatomic particles, making subjective experience a direct consequence of quantum physics rather than something separate from it.
Schrödinger developed wave mechanics—the mathematical framework describing quantum state evolution—earning the 1933 Nobel Prize. His book What Is Life? (1944) applied quantum physics to biology, predicting the aperiodic crystal structure of genes before DNA's discovery. Deeply influenced by Vedanta philosophy, which holds consciousness as fundamental, he spent his later career bridging quantum formalism with the hard problem of mind, making this speculation a natural extension of his lifelong intellectual obsessions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, quantum mechanics was triumphant but philosophically unsettled—the measurement problem and the observer's role remained hotly debated. Neuroscience was nascent: DNA's structure had just been cracked in 1953, and the brain's signaling mechanisms were barely mapped. Against this backdrop, Schrödinger's suggestion that consciousness might require quantum-level explanation was genuinely radical, anticipating by decades the quantum-mind debates that Penrose, Hameroff, and others would later formalize.
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