Erwin Schrodinger (Scientist)

Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was born in Vienna to an Austrian father and a half-English mother and received his doctorate at the university there. After World War I, during which he served as an artillery officer, Schrodinger had appointments at several German universities before becoming professor of physics in Zurich, Switzerland. Late in November, 1925, Schrodinger gave a talk on de Broglie’s notion that a moving particle has a wave character. A colleague remarked to him afterward that to deal properly with a wave, one needs a wave equation. Schrodinger took this to heart, and a few weeks later he was “struggling with a new atomic theory. If only I knew more mathematics! I am very optimistic about this thing and expect that if I can only . . . solve it, it will be very beautiful.” (Schrodinger was not the only physicist to find the mathematics he needed difficult; the eminent mathematician David Hilbert said at about this time, “Physics is much too hard for physicists.”)

The straggle was successful, and in January 1926 the first of four papers on “Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem” was completed. In this epochal paper Schrodinger introduced the equation that bears his name and solved it for the hydrogen atom, thereby opening wide the door to the modern view of the atom which others had only pushed ajar. By June Schrodinger had applied wave mechanics to the harmonic oscillator, the diatomic molecule, the hydrogen atom in an electric field, the absorption and emission of radiation, and the scattering of radiation by atoms and molecules. He had also shown that his wave mechanics was mathematically equivalent to the more abstract Heisenberg-Bom-Jordan matrix mechanics.

The significance of Schrodinger’s work was at once realized. In 1927 he succeeded Planck at the University of Berlin but left Germany in 1933, the year he received the Nobel Prize, when ihe Nazis came to power. He was at Dublin’s Institute for Advanced Study from 1939 unttl his return to Austria in 1956. In Dublin, Schrodinger became interested in biology, in particular the mechanism of heredity. He seems to have been the first to make definite the idea of a genetic code and to identify genes as long molecules that carry the code in the form of variations in how their atoms are arranged. Schrodinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? was enormously influential, not only by what it said but also by introducing biologists to a new way of thinking—that of the physicist—about their subject. What Is Life? started James Watson on his search for “the secret of the gene,” which he and Francis Crick (a physicist) discovered in 1953 to be the structure of the DNA molecule.