This background may explain some of this physicist's deep interest in the foundations of biology. However, he had some more unusual interests related to Eastern religions and pantheism – religious symbols often appeared in his work. In my opinion, this fact boils down to his family background, too. He was brought up in a Lutheran family but called himself an atheist. What he really meant by the word "atheist" was a "heretic" which is why his generalized "atheism" also allows the Eastern religions and similar things.
When he was in his 20s, he would study philosophy and experimental science and similar things in Vienna. During the First World War, right after he got habilitated in 1914, he was an officer in the Austrian fortress artillery. In 1920, he would become Max Wien's assistant and 1 year later, he was already a full professor in Breslau (now in Poland). In 1921, he went to Zürich. In 1927, after some of his famous years, he moved to Berlin to succeed Max Planck there.
In 1933, due to Erwin's peaceful opposition to the emerging institutionalized anti-Semitism in Germany, he moved to Oxford. However, the Britons were discriminating against women – at least when their number was greater than one. Schrödinger was living with his wife, with his mistress, and with his cat Milton. A year later, he would lecture at Princeton and hope that the New Jersey-based university wouldn't discriminate against households in which women were overrepresented. So no job worked over there, either. He delayed some visa paperwork and missed a job in Edinburgh as well which is why he took a position in Graz, Austria, in 1936. When Austria was absorbed by the Third Reich in 1939, he apologized for his previous opposition to Nazism – he would later apologize to Einstein for this apology. ;-)
In 1935, he proposed the "paradox" of his cat. In 1944, he was already intrigued by the research of life and proposed negentropy (the entropy that a living form may "export" to keep its entropy low) as well as a molecule that carries the gene. The latter proposal inspired James Watson to study genes and discover the DNA in 1953 according to Watson's own memoirs. However, Schrödinger wasn't really the first one to talk about the molecule of genes; it was H. J. Muller in the 1920s.
In the 1950s, he would move further towards consciousness and spiritualism but he also replaced his wife and mistress with assorted Irish women whom he made pregnant. He liked to be involved with the students. This whole life sounds dynamic, happy, and independent of conventions but Schrödinger did all these things despite his being a tuberculosis sufferer since the early 1920s – the disease finally killed him in 1961. His and his wife Annemarie Bertel's grave says\[
i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Psi = \hat H \Psi.
\] Guess whose equation it is. As a young scientist, he would study some ordinary classical questions in physics such as vibrations, electrical engineering, lightnings, radioactivity in the air, Brownian motion, and other things. Since 1921, he would work on the old Bohr model of the atom; he would write papers about color perception and colorimetry during the 1920s, too.
Most importantly, in January 1926 (months after the discovery of the matrix form of quantum mechanics), he would "derive" his equation and solved the hydrogen atom in the very same paper. It's a pretty difficult problem so his publishing the results in a single package seems rather impressive to me. Weeks later, he would also establish the basic quantum mechanical solutions for the harmonic oscillator, rigid rotors, diatomic molecules, and offered a new "derivation" of his equation. In the third paper in May 1926, he would demonstrate the equivalence of his equations to the Heisenberg equations (Dirac did a more comprehensible and universalist maneuver at roughly the same time) and treated the Stark effect. The fourth paper in this cool tetralogy would deal with time-dependent problems and scattering.
Rather soon, he would also started to say rubbish about quantum mechanics. Heisenberg originally said "I had no faith in a theory that ran completely counter to our Copenhagen conception." Needless to say, it was really the philosophical encapsulation that irritated Heisenberg – he saw why the equations were equivalent once the proof was given. But Heisenberg clearly rightfully kept his hostility towards the broader framework in which Schrödinger formulated his physics:
The more I think about the physical portion of Schrödinger's theory, the more repulsive I find it... What Schrödinger writes about the visualizability of his theory 'is probably not quite right,' in other words it's crap.While Schrödinger sort of understood that the interesting question is one about the eigenvalues of the Hamiltonians, he would misunderstand what quantum mechanics says in most of the other situations. So he would literally say that the wave function is an electron spread like cheese, and many other patently wrong things.Heisenberg, writing to Pauli, 1926
His misunderstanding didn't go away which is why he proposed his Schrödinger's cat experiment. He was convinced that the cat couldn't be in a superposition in any sense. It's clear by now – and it has arguably been clear since the mid 1920s – that the superpositions of quantum states are always equally allowed as the contributing ket vectors themselves. The superposition principle is essential and universally valid; in fact, contemporary experimenters are able to bring ever larger, pretty much macroscopic objects to generally superposed states. The superpositions usually can't be directly "perceived" as a possible answer to the measurement but quantum mechanics doesn't imply that they can.
Because of nothing else than the "visualizability", Schrödinger's equation became a more popular "picture" in which one may formulate quantum mechanics than the original matrix mechanics itself – I would say unfortunately (because it leads many people to the incorrect conclusion that the wave function is just another classical field and no "revolution" is needed) – but Schrödinger has never belonged to the group of founding fathers who correctly grasped the big picture and who could actively construct the right quantum mechanical explanation of any situation. So right after his constructive and impressive tetralogy of papers, he would become a chronic anti-quantum whiner.
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