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{{Infobox scientist
| name = Erwin Schrödinger
| birth_date = {{birth date|1887|8|12|df=y}}
| birth_place = Vienna, Austria-Hungary
| death_date = {{death date and age|1961|1|4|1887|8|12|df=y}}
| death_place = Vienna, Austria
| nationality = Austrian
| fields = Theoretical physics
| workplaces = University of Zurich; University of Berlin; University of Oxford; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
| known_for = Wave mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, Schrödinger's cat, ''What Is Life?''
| prizes = Nobel Prize in Physics (1933)
}}

'''Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger''' (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian theoretical physicist who created wave mechanics in 1926 and shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with [[Paul Dirac|Dirac]]. He is unusual among the founders of quantum theory in that he spent the rest of his life objecting to what the theory was taken to mean.

In a series of four papers in ''Annalen der Physik'' during 1926, Schrödinger took [[Louis de Broglie|de Broglie]]'s matter waves seriously and wrote down the wave equation that carries his name, deriving the hydrogen spectrum from it as an eigenvalue problem. In the same year he proved that his wave mechanics and [[Werner Heisenberg|Heisenberg]]'s matrix mechanics are mathematically equivalent. He succeeded [[Max Planck|Planck]] at Berlin in 1927, left Germany in 1933 in protest at the Nazi regime, and after a period at Oxford and a dangerous year in Graz settled at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies from 1940 to 1956.

His 1944 book ''What Is Life?'' argued that the hereditary material must be an aperiodic crystal carrying a code-script, and is credited by Crick, Watson and Wilkins among others with drawing them into molecular biology. He also worked on unified field theory alongside [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]], and wrote extensively on philosophy, including ''Nature and the Greeks'', ''Mind and Matter'' and ''My View of the World'' — the last drawing openly on Vedanta.

==Against the Copenhagen reading==

Schrödinger intended ψ as something physically real — a continuous wave process in space, not a catalogue of probabilities. Born's probability interpretation and the Copenhagen doctrine of measurement-induced collapse he regarded as an evasion. His 1935 cat thought-experiment was constructed to show that the reading was absurd, not to illustrate it: if superposition is taken literally and collapse only on observation, a macroscopic animal ends up in a superposed state, which he took as a ''reductio''.

He also discovered ''Zitterbewegung'' (1930), the rapid trembling motion implied by the Dirac equation for a free electron, an effect that has repeatedly been used since as evidence that the point electron conceals internal structure. Late in life he remarked that he did not like quantum mechanics and was sorry he had had anything to do with it.

==On this wiki==

Schrödinger is one of the few twentieth-century founders treated here as an ally rather than a target, precisely because of that dissent. Two arguments recur.

'''That the wave equation is derivable from a medium.''' [[Nina B Sotina]]'s "[[Derivation of the Schrodinger Equation from the Laws of Classical Mechanics Taking into Account the Ether]]" attempts exactly what the title says, treating the equation as the statistical description of classical motion in a subquantum medium. [[A P Bredimas]], in "[[Schrodinger's "Aether" Unifies Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Theories|Schrodinger's 'Aether' Unifies Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Theories]]" (1997), makes the medium explicit and uses it to join quantum theory to relativity. [[Milo M Wolff]]'s "[[Schrödinger's Universe: Einstein, Waves and the Origin of the Natural Laws]]" (2008) builds a wave-structure account of matter from the same starting point. See [[:Category:Aether]].

'''That the wrong branch was taken in 1926.''' [[Wladimir Guglinski]]'s "[[The Missed U-Turn: The Duel Heisenberg vs Schrodinger]]" (2009) states the thesis in its title: physics chose Heisenberg's abstract formalism over Schrödinger's continuous picture, and should not have. [[Evert Jan Post]] argues a related case in "[[On the Wages of Copenhagen's Non-Classical Sins]]" (2004) and "[[Quantum Reprogramming - A Long Overdue and Least Intrusive Reality Adaptation of the Copenhagen Interpretation]]" (2005), and [[Franco Selleri]] and [[Alwyn Van der Merwe]]'s "[[Quantum Paradoxes and Physical Reality]]" (1990) is the wiki's standard reference for realist objections to the Copenhagen interpretation. [[Don L Hotson]]'s "[[Dirac's Equation: A Relativistic Generalization of the Schrödinger Wave Equation - The Other Half]]" (2001) takes up the discarded negative-energy solutions.

Related material sits in [[:Category:Quantum Theory]] and [[:Category:Atomic Structure]], including [[Alan McCone]]'s Sub-Quantum Physics series and [[Thomas E Phipps]]'s "[[Generalization of Quantum Mechanics]]" (''Physical Review'', 1960).

It should be noted that Schrödinger's own objections were interpretive. He never disputed the equation's predictive success, and neither, in the main, do the researchers here — the argument is about what is oscillating.

==See also==

* [[Quantum Theory]]
* [[Werner Heisenberg]]
* [[Louis de Broglie]]
* [[Paul Dirac]]
* [[Wave-Particle Duality]]
* [[Aether]]

[[Category:Scientist|Schrodinger Erwin]]
[[Category:Quantum Theory]]
[[Category:Atomic Structure]]
[[Category:Aether]]

Erwin Schrödinger - Revision history

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