Waving Hello to a New Subatomic Theory

1926: Nuclear physicist Erwin Schrödinger writes a letter to Albert Einstein, introducing a new term: wave mechanics. Things are getting particularly interesting. If they are things. Well, probably.

Schrödinger was home-schooled in Austria until age 11. After attending school with other youngsters, he enrolled at the University of Vienna, earning a Ph.D. in physics. As an artillery officer in the Austrian army in World War I, he served on the Italian front. He might have bombarded the young ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway. Or he might not have.

After the war, academic opportunities in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were not what they used to be. Schrödinger oscillated from job to job before settling into a professorship at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

A footnote in a paper by Albert Einstein inspired Schrödinger to model the motion of an electron around a nucleus as a wave rather than an orbiting particle. He began a correspondence with Einstein (then in Berlin) and proposed the term Wellenmechanik, or wave mechanics.

1926 was an astonishingly fertile year for Schrödinger, much like Einstein’s own 1905 annus mirabilis or Isaac Newton’s before that. Schrödinger published four papers, elucidating wave mechanics, expressing the new formulation in a precise equation, showing how it confirmed Niels Bohr’s atomic model, and demonstrating how the Schrödinger theory paralleled — rather than contradicted — Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics.

Schrödinger moved in 1931 to the University of Berlin to succeed Max Planck. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Schrödinger — a nominal Catholic with an interest in Vedanta and other Eastern philosophies — was disturbed by the dismissal and flight of his Jewish colleagues. He left Germany and took a position at Oxford.

During his first week at Oxford, Schrödinger won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Paul Dirac). Unfortunately, Oxford did not take to its new Nobel laureate: The dons seemed to mind that Schrödinger was living with two women.

He returned to the University of Graz in Austria in 1936, but was dismissed from the faculty after Germany annexed that nation in 1938. He lived and taught in Ireland until 1956, when he returned to his homeland for the final five years of his life.

Did Schrödinger, at any time, have a cat? He might have.Source: PBS

Photo: Corbis