Erwin Schrodinger died in Vienna on January 4, 1961, at the age of seventy-three, having reshaped the foundations of modern physics while maintaining a personal life so unconventional that it scandalized even his liberal-minded colleagues. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 for the Schrodinger equation, a mathematical description of the quantum behavior of particles that remains the central equation of quantum mechanics. In 1935, he proposed a thought experiment involving a cat in a box that is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the quantum state of a radioactive atom connected to a vial of poison. Schrodinger intended the scenario as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that the idea of superposition produced absurd results when applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment became the most famous illustration in all of physics, though it is frequently cited in exactly the opposite way he intended, as a celebration of quantum weirdness rather than a demonstration of its problems. After the Anschluss of 1938 united Austria with Nazi Germany, Schrodinger fled to Dublin, where he spent seventeen years at the Institute for Advanced Studies. During that period he wrote What Is Life?, a slim book that examined biological processes through the lens of physics and proposed that genetic information must be stored in an "aperiodic crystal." The book directly influenced James Watson and Francis Crick in their pursuit of the structure of DNA. Schrodinger returned to Vienna in 1956 and spent his final years teaching at the university where he had once been a student.