Schr

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Schrödinger
Erwin
(1887 1961)
The task is not so much to see what no-one has
yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet
thought, about that which everybody sees.
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Early life

• Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was born
  in 1887 in Erdberg, Vienna to Rudolf Schrödinger,
  a linoleum factory owner botanist, and Georgine
  Emilia Brenda, daughter of Alexander Bauer (a
  Professor of Chemistry).

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Vienna
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Early life

• Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was born
  in 1887 in Erdberg, Vienna to Rudolf Schrödinger,
  a linoleum factory owner botanist, and Georgine
  Emilia Brenda, daughter of Alexander Bauer (a
  Professor of Chemistry).
• The young Schrödinger received private lessons
  from a tutor at home until the age of ten.
• He then attended Akademisches Gymnasium until his
  graduation in 1906.
• From 1906 to 1910 he was a student at the
  University of Vienna, during which time he came
  under the strong influence of Fritz Hasenöhrl,
  who was Boltzmann's successor.
• On 20 May 1910, Schrödinger was awarded his
  doctorate for the dissertation On the conduction
  of electricity on the surface of insulators in
  moist air. He then became assistant to Franz
  Exner- an important pioneer of modern physics in
  Austria at the time.

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Academic Life

• In 1914, Schrodinger participated in the war
  effort as part of the Austrian Fortress
  Artillery. In 1920, he took up an academic
  position as assistant to Max Wien, followed by
  positions at Stuttgart (extraordinary professor),
  Breslau (ordinary professor), and at the
  University of Zurich (replacing von Laue) where
  he settled for six years. Schrödinger, in his
  autobiography Meine Leben, Meine Weltansicht,
  described Wien as moderately anti-semetic.
• His papers at this time dealt with specific heats
  of solids, with problems of thermodynamics (he
  was greatly interested in Boltzmann's probability
  theory) and of atomic spectra in addition, he
  indulged in physiological studies of colour (as a
  result of his contacts with Kohlrausch and Exner,
  and of Helmholtz's lectures).
• It was during his stay at the University of
  Vienna that he became interested in eigenvalue
  problems and especially in their application to
  the new quantum theory.

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Academic life

• His great discovery, Schrödinger's wave equation,
  was made in the first half of 1926. It came as a
  result of his dissatisfaction with the quantum
  condition in Bohr's orbit theory and his belief
  that atomic spectra should really be determined
  by some kind of eigenvalue problem.
• He became convinced that the energies of a
  confined particle could be determined as
  eigenvalue solutions to a particular
  eigenfunction, a probabilistic wave function.
• He published his work in Annalen der Physik (the
  same publication that Einstein used to publish
  his theories of relativity) under the very
  imaginative title, Quantisation as an eigenvalue
  problem.
• For this work he shared the Nobel Prize in 1933
  with Paul Dirac for the discovery of new
  productive forms of atomic theory.

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Academic life

• His great discovery, Schrödinger's wave equation,
  is below. H-bar is Plancks constant, m is the
  mass of the particle, Psi is the wave function,
  V(x) is the potential energy and E is the
  particles energy. This formulation of quantum
  mechanics has the form of an eigenvalue problem.
• The solution of the Schrodinger Equation (the
  eigenvalues) gives the allowed energy levels (or
  orbitals surrounding a nucleus).

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Schrodingers cat

• After consultation with Einstein, Schrodinger
  proposed a thought experiment in which he
  highlighted the apparent inconsistencies between
  the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of
  Quantum Mechanics and the reality of macroscopic
  measurements.
• He proposed that a cat be placed in a sealed box.
  The release of a poison is then subject to the
  probabilistic decay of a radioactive isotope. If
  the isotope decays, the poison is released. If no
  decay occurs, the poison is not released.
• The result is that the cat is in a superposition
  of states between being dead, and being alive.
  This is very unintuitive.

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His Dublin life

• In 1940, Schrodinger was asked by Eamonn deValera
  (who had been a Mathematics teacher at Blackrock
  College) to help establish the Dublin Institute
  for Advanced Studies, on Merrion Square.
• He became Director of the School of Theoretical
  Physics and remained in Ireland for 17 years
  until his retirement in 1955. During this time he
  became a naturalised Irish citizen.
• During his time at the Institute he wrote about
  fifty further publications on various topics
  including his attempt at formulating a unified
  field theory.
• After retiring at the ripe old age of 68, he
  returned to Vienna

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What is life?

• In 1944, Schrodinger wrote a book that was to
  change the course of scientific endeavour in the
  biological sciences.
• He published his book, What is life?, with a view
  to explaining the characteristics of life and
  speculating on the mechanism for the storage of
  biological information.
• Both James Watson and Francis Crick, who
  discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, later
  cited Schrodingers book as their inspiration in
  searching for the information transfer mechanism.
• Schrodinger also delivered a series of lectures
  with the same title in what is now the
  Schrodinger Lecture Theatre in Trinity College a
  year before the book was published.
• It was from this platform that he introduced the
  idea of negative entropy or negentropy, which
  means that life may be associated with a local
  decrease in entropy (organisation of the
  organism) which is offset by borrowing entropy
  from the surroundings (food).

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Schrodingers
Other equation


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Personal life

• Despite being one of the greatest thinkers of the
  20th Century, Schrodinger had a more unusual
  approach to his personal life.
• Schrodinger had married Annemarie Bertel in 1920.
• It has been widely reported (mostly by Cormac
  McGuinness) that Schrodinger had a eureka moment
  when he was holidaying in the Alps with one of
  his mistresses in which he saw his famous
  Schrodinger Equation flash before his eyes.
• Schrodinger requested that Arthur March become
  his assistant while he was working in Oxford
  because Schrodinger was in love with Marchs
  wife, Hilde.
• Schrodinger was offered a teaching position at
  Princeton but after extensive negotiations he
  declined the position. It is thought that
  Princeton would not house him with his wife and
  his mistress. Instead, he went to DUBLIN, to the
  Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, who
  obligingly provided said housing arrangement.
• While in Ireland, Schrodinger also fathered two
  children, by two different women.
• .

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Schrodingers legacy

• Schrodinger died on January 4th, 1961, of
  tuberculosis at the age of 73, in his native
  Austria.
• He was survived by his widow, Anny (his original
  wife), his various misstresses and numerous
  children.
• The huge Schrodinger Crater, on the far side of
  the moon, was named after him by the IAU
  (International Astronomical Union).
• The Erwin Schrodinger International Institute for
  Mathematical Physics was established in Vienna in
  1993.

Thats a psi, by the way!
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Applause
ANY QUESTIONS
By Catherine McGinty and Simon Hall
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stop
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Applause