Erwin Schrodinger — "The great difficulty is to get rid of the idea that we are separate from the wor…"
The great difficulty is to get rid of the idea that we are separate from the world.
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More from Erwin Schrodinger
"The human mind is capable of understanding the universe, but it is also capable of creating its own illusions."
"The idea that consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain is an illusion. Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, and the brain is merely an antenna that tunes into it."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"The total number of minds in the universe is one."
"The fact that the world is in a constant state of flux is the very reason why it can be understood."
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
The quote argues that humans naturally experience themselves as distinct observers looking out at an external reality — but this separation is a cognitive illusion. We are not watching the world from outside it; we are made of the same matter, obeying the same laws, entangled in the same systems. Overcoming this intuition is genuinely difficult because it runs against every ordinary experience of selfhood and perception.
Relevance to Erwin Schrodinger
Schrödinger's wave mechanics showed particles aren't discrete objects but probability waves spread through space — collapsing the clean boundary between thing and location. He wrote extensively on consciousness in What is Life? and Mind and Matter, and was deeply influenced by Vedanta philosophy, which holds that individual self and universal reality are one. His famous cat paradox forced physicists to confront the observer's entanglement with the observed.
The era
Schrödinger developed wave mechanics in the 1920s, during quantum physics' revolutionary decade. The Copenhagen interpretation established that observation itself affects quantum outcomes, collapsing the observer-world boundary in physics. Meanwhile, two world wars shook Western civilization's confidence in materialist, rationalist frameworks. Western intellectuals increasingly turned to Eastern philosophy, particularly Vedanta and Buddhism. This cultural moment made Schrödinger's position — that selfhood and world are continuous, not divided — resonate far beyond physics.
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