Schrodinger Born: Quantum Mechanics' Wave Equation Pioneer

Erwin Schrodinger developed the wave equation that became the foundation of quantum mechanics, the mathematical description of how subatomic particles behave. Born in Vienna in 1887, he studied physics at the University of Vienna before serving as an artillery officer in World War I. In 1926, while staying at a villa in Arosa, Switzerland, with a mistress whose identity has never been confirmed, he produced the equation that bears his name. The Schrodinger equation describes the quantum state of physical systems and their evolution over time, and it remains as fundamental to physics as Newton's laws of motion. Then he spent years pointing out how absurd the implications were. His famous cat thought experiment, proposed in 1935, imagined a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison triggered by radioactive decay. According to quantum mechanics, the cat would be simultaneously alive and dead until someone opened the box and observed it. He invented the scenario to mock the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which held that particles exist in superposition until measured. The thought experiment was meant as a reductio ad absurdum, not a serious physical proposal. He was right that quantum mechanics was strange. He was wrong that the strangeness meant the theory was incomplete. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, sharing the ceremony with Paul Dirac. He fled Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938, eventually settling in Dublin, where he spent seventeen years at the Institute for Advanced Studies. His 1944 book What Is Life? influenced the discovery of DNA by suggesting that genetic information was stored in an aperiodic crystal.