LIFE IN A QUANTUM WORLD: SCHRÖDINGER AND THE MYSTERIES OF EXISTENCE

He gave physics its most famous equation and then spent thirty-five years objecting to what everyone did with it. Erwin Schrödinger is remembered for a cat that almost nobody understands, an equation almost nobody can read, and a private life that has recently been argued about with more heat than evidence. He deserves better, and he deserves worse, and this book attempts both. Working from his own confession that he rarely said the first word but often the second, this account follows a career built almost entirely out of objections. He objected to a French graduate student and produced wave mechanics. He objected to the algebra of Werner Heisenberg and then proved it equivalent to his own. He objected to Max Born, to Niels Bohr, to the whole triumphant interpretation that his own work had made possible, and he lost every round without once conceding. He objected to biologists about the nature of heredity and was wrong in a way that changed biology anyway. And on one occasion in June of 1926 he objected to himself, smuggled a quantity into his equation that he privately disliked, and discovered nine decades later - through experiments he would have found astonishing - that it was the one thing that could never be removed. Along the way: a color theory that still governs every screen in the world, half of an uncertainty principle that fell out of the textbooks, a discussion in Copenhagen conducted at a patient's bedside, a compromising newspaper article in Graz, a prime minister who understood mathematics, and a small book about living cells that was mostly unoriginal where it was right and mostly wrong where it was original, and which founded molecular biology regardless. There is no mathematics in these pages. There is a great deal of argument, a fair amount of comedy, and one sustained proposition: that in the crucial years nothing whatsoever was derived, everything was guessed, and the guessing was correct. Physics has been quietly embarrassed about this ever since. >Keywords: quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, history of physics, wave function, scientific discovery, philosophy of science, popular science