Erwin Schrodinger — "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
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More from Erwin Schrodinger
"The scientific picture of the world is a simplification, an abstraction, and it is not the whole truth."
"Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine."
"The best way to escape from the problem is to solve it."
"We are all stardust."
"What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
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
Logic operates within established rules, moving predictably from known premises to conclusions that follow necessarily. Imagination breaks those rails entirely — it lets you conceive what has never existed, ask questions no framework has yet framed, and leap toward possibilities logic cannot reach because they haven't been established as reachable. The greatest discoveries don't come from following steps correctly but from daring to envision something entirely beyond the current map.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger's 1926 wave equation emerged from imagining electrons not as particles but as probability waves — a concept with no classical analogue requiring pure imaginative courage. His cat paradox demanded envisioning quantum superposition at human scale to expose contradictions in the Copenhagen interpretation. His book What is Life? imaginatively linked thermodynamics to genetics decades before DNA's discovery, proving repeatedly that his science advanced wherever logic alone could not follow.
The era
The 1920s–1940s shattered deterministic Newtonian physics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and quantum superposition demanded entirely new conceptual frameworks — classical logic simply couldn't reach these truths. Scientists of Schrödinger's generation worked in a moment where imagination was not optional but existentially necessary: two world wars demonstrated technology's destructive reach while simultaneously forcing open profound questions about consciousness, life, and physical reality that pure deductive reasoning had never dared address.
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