The scientific picture of the world is very successful, but it is incomplete. It leaves out something essential, something that is very close to us, namely, our own consciousness.
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"The world is not a collection of independent objects, but a single, indivisible whole."
"Quantum mechanics has taught us that the world is not as solid and substantial as we thought."
"If we were to take the wave function to be a complete description of reality, then the living and dead cat would indeed be equally real."
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively. But it is not a logical necessity."
"The world is not to be understood by reason alone. It is also to be understood by intuition and feeling."
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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Science excels at measuring, predicting, and describing the external world—from quantum particles to galaxies. But all those equations and observations exist only because someone is aware of them. Consciousness—the felt, first-person experience of being alive—is absent from every scientific model. Schrödinger argues this isn't a minor oversight; it's a fundamental incompleteness, since the very instrument doing the science is the mind science cannot fully account for.
Schrödinger formulated the wave equation governing quantum systems, yet spent decades troubled by what quantum mechanics implies about the observer. His books "What Is Life?" and "Mind and Matter" show a physicist genuinely wrestling with consciousness. He studied Vedanta philosophy and believed the multiplicity of minds might be an illusion of one universal consciousness. For him, omitting awareness from physics wasn't academic—it was the central unresolved problem of his intellectual life.
In the 1940s–1950s, quantum mechanics had just dismantled classical determinism, leaving physicists arguing about what observation and measurement actually mean. Logical positivism dominated philosophy, insisting only empirically verifiable statements mattered—threatening to make consciousness philosophically unspeakable. Meanwhile, Turing was asking whether machines could think. The tension between physics' extraordinary success and its complete silence on inner experience was becoming impossible for reflective scientists like Schrödinger to ignore.
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