Erwin Schrödinger. A fierce opponent of the Nazi regime and the proud owner of a quantum cat

Schrödinger was interested in the question of how the electron surrounds the atom, and offered a quantum answer. He had the ability to illustrate, thanks to which we remember him to this day.

Erwin Schrödinger was the only son of educated parents. His father was the owner of a fabric dye company, a talented painter and a botanist. His mother was half Austrian and half English. There were also religious differences between them: his father was Catholic while his mother was Lutheran. Although he grew up in a religious home, Schrödinger called himself an atheist, although he was interested in Eastern religions and pantheism, which greatly influenced his scientific ideas.

Irwin was homeschooled by private tutors and his parents until the age of 11. Then he entered high school to prepare for university. He was accepted to the University of Vienna where he was inspired by a young physicist, Friedrich Hasenhorl. Schrödinger received his doctorate in physics and received an office at the university where he remained until the First World War.

He fought as an artillery officer on the Italian front. During the war, Hasenhorl was killed. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1933, Schrödinger noted that without the war it would have been Moro Hasenhorl who would have been honored. When the war was coming to an end, he decided to think about his professional future as a professor at the University of Chernivtsi, but one of the results of the war was the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which also controlled parts of today's Poland and Ukraine, and thus this possibility fell off the agenda. He returned to his relatively junior position in Vienna, got married and was then offered a new position. He changed jobs several times until he finally got to head the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland in 1921.

His six years in Zurich were the most fruitful of his career. Although he did not start the research that led to his publication - wave mechanics - until 1925. By the way, his interest in the theory was ignited thanks to a marginal note in Albert Einstein's article.

Schrödinger decided to think of an explanation for the movement of electrons inside the atom as waves. In 1926 he published his paper, providing a theoretical basis for the atomic model that Niels Bohr proposed based on laboratory findings. The equation he discovered later earned the nickname "Schrödinger's wave equation." It was the second theoretical explanation of the electron movement inside the atom, after Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. Many scientists preferred Schrödinger's theory because it can be simulated, while Heisenberg's is purely mathematical. Physicists split into two camps, but Schrödinger soon showed that the two theories were the same, just expressed in a different way.

In 1927, Schrödinger was offered a prestigious position: to replace Max Planck upon his retirement at the University of Berlin. Schrödinger didn't like the idea of ​​leaving the Alps and moving to the crowded city, but he agreed. It turned out to be an excellent period of study and teaching for Schrödinger, but it came to an ugly end with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. He saw how many of his colleagues were fired from their jobs and forced to leave Germany. He too chose to leave in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He moved to the University of Oxford in Great Britain, and in the first week of his stay there he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Paul Dirac.
After three years he returned to his original position at the Austrian university, but in 1938 Germany invaded its neighbor and Schrödinger was fired. The Prime Minister of Ireland at the time Eamon de Vallara, who was a mathematician by profession, invited Schrödinger to the Institute for Advanced Studies that he had established in Dublin. Schrödinger immigrated there with few belongings and almost no money. He stayed there for 17 years, during which he devoted his attention to philosophical questions about physics and its relationship with other fields.

In 1956, after the end of the war and the end of the foreign occupation of Austria, Schrödinger returned to Vienna. He fell ill a year later and died in 1961.

Aryeh Melamed Katz in his article The ten great discoveries of physics and astronomy In the journal Galileo mentions Schrödinger's unique contribution to quantum physics.

"Many have contributed to quantum theory, and many have interpreted it, and it is not possible to list them all here. Nevertheless, we will try to bring the essence of quantum theory, or in other words we will tell about the Schrödinger equation. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger was impressed by Louis de Broglie's doctoral thesis, and especially by the fact that he presented particles as waves. Schrödinger proposed to describe some quantum system with the help of a wave function, which is the solution of the equation that bears his name. The wave function can be presented as a superposition (overlap) of states, and this way of recording simply allows one to find the allowed values ​​that will be obtained in the experiment and to calculate the probabilities of measuring these values. It can be said that he proposed a simple solution method for some quantum problem, although practically one usually has to settle for an approximate solution. It is worth emphasizing that from the philosophical aspect, quantum theory is both probabilistic and deterministic, since the probabilities of receiving certain measurements are calculated deterministically."

In 2012, Serge Herosh and David Wineland won the Nobel Prize for their invention and separately developed revolutionary methods for measuring and controlling individual particles while maintaining their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously considered impossible. In fact, they managed to resurrect Schrödinger's cat. Following the win he wrote Dr. Moshe Nahamani: "In order to describe the ridiculous results of the transition between the micro-world of quantum physics and the normal macro-world that we experience every day, Schrödinger devised a particularly clever experiment with a cat: Schrödinger's cat is in a box that is completely isolated from the outside world. In the box is also a bottle of deadly cyanide that is released after the decay of a certain radioactive atom, which is also in the box.

The radioactive decay is dictated by the laws of quantum physics, according to which the material is in states of decay where it has both had time to decay and has not yet decayed. Therefore, the cat is also supposed to be in a composition of states of being both alive and dead. Now, if we look inside the box, we risk killing the cat because the quantum combination of states is so sensitive to interactions with the outside world that any attempt to look at the cat will immediately result in the collapse of the dual state and we will receive only one of them - a live cat or a dead cat. In Schrödinger's eyes, this clever experiment leads to a ridiculous conclusion, and it is claimed that he later apologized for spreading confusion in the field of quantum physics.

Erwin Schrödinger, formulates the fundamental equation of quantum theory

For the article following Erwin Schrödinger's Nobel lecture from 1933 on the Nobel Prize website