Erwin Schrodinger

This is the story of a man who lived a good life and contributed to the field of physics. He became personal friends with one of the smartest men in history, Albert Einstein. But as I said before, this is not the story of Einstein; it is about a man who helped create many breakthroughs which are still being learned about today in our schools. This is about Erwin Schrцdinger, the guy with a cat in a box.

Erwin Schrodinger was born on August 12th, 1887 in Vienna to a linoleum business owner. He was an only child and was educated in his early years by a tutor who came to his home twice every week and he could speak multiple languages including English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. In 1898 , at the age of eleven, he continued his education at the Academic Gymnasium where he started his studies in math and physics.

In 1906 he entered the University of Vienna. The following year he attended lectures about theoretical physics. In 1910 he received his doctorate and became the assistant to Franz Exner at the University's Second Physics Institute. He remained there until World War I. During the war he served as an artillery officer on the Italian front. During his time at the Institute he published papers on a range of subjects such as magnetism, radioactivity, x-rays, and Brownian motion.

On June 6, 1920 he married Annemarie Beitel. That same year he became the assistant of Max Wien and became the equivalent of an associate professor. In 1921, Erwin was appointed to the Chair of the Theoretical Physics in Zurich, formerly held by Albert Einstein. During this time he published papers that touched on general relativity, probability theory, dielectric phenomena, and 3- and 4-color theories of vision. His main efforts concentrated the atomic theory.

The papers that secured his reputation were composed in a six month period of writing before he left Zurich. They were widely celebrated as some of the most important achievements in the early 20th century. In 1926 he invented wave mechanics and an equation dealing with it which he named the Schrцdinger equation. Later this equation became the foundation of modern quantum mechanics. The invention of wave mechanics represented an attempt to overcome difficulties in Niels Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. He used the mathematics of waves in a way which attempted to eliminate quantum jumps, the instantaneous movement of electrons from one energy level to another. He sought to represent this quantum transition as the passage of energy from one vibrational form to another rather than jumping electrons. Transition from one energy state to another was akin to the change in the vibration of a violin string from one note to another. He then announced the four seminal papers which contained his work on the wave mechanics which were then published in the Annulen de Physik in early 1926. Wave mechanics was eagerly embraced by numerous scientists who had been puzzled by the emerging atomic theory. In 1927 he went with Max Planck to the Freidrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He stayed there until 1933 because of the Nazi Germany's anti-semitism.

That same year he went to the Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. he and Paul Dirac were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to the advancements of quantum physics that same year. His did not stay at Oxford due to personal reasons and went to lecture at Princeton University. He was offered a permanent position there but he declined the offer. After trying to get a position at the University of Edenburg he went took up a position at the University of Graz in Austria in 1936.

When Germany occupied Austria in 1938, Schrцdinger had problems because he left Germany and for his hatred of Nazism. After retracting his statement of his hatred of Nazism, which he regretted doing, he and his wife fled to Italy. In 1940, he was asked to help create an institute for advanced studies in Dublin, Ireland. He became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics where he remained and published 50 more papers including one on his research of unified field theory.

In 1944 he wrote a book entitled "What is life?", which contained many subjects including the concepts of a complex molecule for the genetic code of a living thing. In James Watson's autobiography, he said it was Schrцdinger's work that inspired him to research and later find the double helix structure of DNA. Schrцdinger also influenced Francis Crick to further his research.

Schrцdinger stayed in Dublin until he retired in 1955. During this time