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A man sits at his desk, franticly puzzling at a piece of work. The cold, Austrian winter whirls and flows outside, snow falling down and getting caught in the wind. Lit by dim candle-light the pen is setting ink on the paper. Finally the man sits back, and looks at his work. He falls asleep, still in his chair. On the paper, possibly the most famous equation in all of science. 

Schrodinger's equation. 

 

A few years ago, I was browsing YouTube for science videos, as you do, and I stumbled across a vid that was labeled "superpositions". Intrigued I clicked and began to watch. In it, the narrator began to talk about "Schrodinger's cat", a thought experiment that outlines how superpositions work. Little did I know that I was being led into a fascination of a scientist I would continue to know and love. Little did I know that I hadn't even touched on the most important piece of work he would ever do, an equation that would be later called the "basis of all chemistry and most of physics" By Freeman Dyson. 

 

Growing up as a kid, everyone has a hero, or a person they look up to and aspire to be, excluding their parents. For a lot of people this is a soccer player or an actor, so on, but for me I was always looking at scientists for inspiration, and I was not disappointed. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists from the well-known, such as Einstein, to the important ones left in the background, such as John Bardeen, who is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics twice. But Schrödinger stood out to me because of his constant persistence and his determination. He also had an innate ability to be able to generate new found and amazing equations and theorems. 

 

He was born on the 12 of August, 1887 and not much is known about him in his early life other than he studied at the university of Vienna from 1906 to 1910 under the physicists Franz S. Exner and Friedrich Hasenohrl. Even in college he was an outstanding member in his field, and earnt the respect of his fellow collogues easily. However his big discovery was made in 1926. 

 

Following his Marriage with Annemarie Bartel and his employment with Max Wein he made the biggest discovery ever in Quantum Physics, a discovery that explained the entirety of the atom, perfectly, and an equation that we still use today. In fact because of this discovery, he is often credited as the basis of all of chemistry and most of physics. In fact, not only did this equation become the bedrock for so many things and people, but it won him a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1933, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." What is often not recognized, is the use of the integer, square root of minus one, which is an imaginary number, and often called, "i". It was the first time it had been used in a published equation. Unfortunately I can't show you the equation here because it involves unusable symbols. A quote that sums it up neatly is by Freeman Dyson. And I quote. "Schrödinger put the square root of minus one into the equation and suddenly it made sense. Suddenly it became a wave equation instead of a heat conduction equation and Schrödinger found, to his delight, that the equation had solutions corresponding to the quantized orbits of the Bohr model of the atom. it turns out that the Schrödinger equation describes correctly everything we know about the behavior of atoms. it is the basis of all of chemistry and most of physics and that square root of minus one means that nature works with complex numbers, not real numbers. This discovery came as a complete surprise, to Schrödinger as well as everybody else." 

 

In 1933 he left the Nazi Germany, as Adolf Hitler had just been elected chancellor. He left for the University of Oxford. Here in England, which had different ideals however, there was a problem. 

You see, Schrödinger was a polygamist, which means he had a "mistress" or affair while he was married. But this version of polygamy was known by both parties. I.e. The wife and the mistress. 

Because of this Oxford University Kicked him out, after he had opted to have a single dormitory for the three of them. This led to similar issues in Cambridge, where he turned down a permanent offer for the same reasons, and the University of Edinburgh, for similar reasons. 

In 1936 He finally accepted an offer at the University of Graz, Austria. He also got a position as Chair in the department of Physics in India. 

 

In 1938, after the Anschluss, a period of time where Austria joined Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War Two, Problems began to arise about his escape in 1933 and his disfavor of "Nazism". Following a statement where he wrote about his love for the ideal, which was not believed and which he later apologized to Einstein for writing, and he and his wife fled to Italy in the same year. 

 

In 1944 he published a book entitled, "What is life" which discusses the genetic molecules that make up organic life, and one of the achievements he is most famous for. In 1955 he retired, and his last lecture was held a year later, where controversially, he refused to talk about the agreed topic of Nuclear energy because of his scepticism about it and instead talked about philosophy. 

 

 

On the 4th of January, in 1961. Erwin Schrödinger died of Tuberculosis, aged 73, but the legacy of Quantum Physics still lives on. Even his grandson Terry Rudolf followed in his large footsteps and became a Quantum Physicist. 

 

To this day Quantum Physics is a confusing and strange field, but maybe that’s why people like me like it so much.