Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961)

Erwin Schrödinger Wikipedia

The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger; August 12, 1887 – January 4, 1961) was an Austrian - Irish physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1933. In 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of the Copenhagen interpretation when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. Schrödinger proposed his "cat", after a suggestion of Albert Einstein's, stating in essence that if a scenario existed where a cat could be so isolated from external interference (decoherence), the state of the cat can only be known as a superposition (combination) of possible rest states (eigenstates), because finding out (measuring the state) cannot be done without the observer interfering with the experiment — the measurement system (the observer) is entangled with the experiment.

The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not easily scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. Philosophically, these positions which emphasize either probability or determined outcomes are called (respectively) positivism and determinism.

Books by Erwin Schrödinger

* "Nature and the Greeks" and "Science and Humanism" Cambridge University Press (1996) ISBN 0521575508.
* "The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" Ox Bow Press (1995) ISBN 1881987094.
* "Statistical Thermodynamics" Dover Publications (1989) ISBN 0486661016.
* "Collected papers" Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn (1984) ISBN 3700105738.
* "My View of the World" Ox Bow Press (1983) ISBN 0918024307.
* "Expanding Universes" Cambridge University Press (1956).
* "Space-Time Structure" Cambridge University Press (1950) ISBN 0521315204.
* "What is Life?" Macmillan (1946)