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Erwin Schrödinger
Times obituary
PHYSICIST AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
Professor Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner who was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1933 to 1938, died on Wednesday in Vienna, Reuters reports. He was 74.
Schrödinger was one of the joint founders of what became known as the "new" quantum theory. Put forward independently and in different forms by Professor Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925 and 1926 respectively, the theory has been of immense importance as it replaces the empirical but useful set of rules provided by the original quantum theory with a coherent theoretical structure. It completed the revolution in ideas which Max Planck had begun and which Niels Bohr had seized upon to provide, intuitively, what was at once seen to be a quantitatively useful account of atomic structure. The new theory enabled the predictions of the old to be reached by logical processes and provided means by which further predictions could be made with no further restriction than that imposed by the complexity of the calculations needed to apply it.
It was not chance that two men should have then developed at the same time what were later shown to be mathematically equivalent versions of the same theory. In 1924, de Broglie had boldly suggested that, just as it was necessary to consider electromagnetic radiation sometimes consisting of waves and sometimes as particles, it might be expected that matter waves should be associated with particles. Following the intuitive procedure characteristic of this period, he put forward a simple equation which predicted what the wavelength associated with, for example, an electron would be. This was at the same time the final chapter in the old quantum theory and a tacit invitation to anyone who could provide a wave theory of matter, or as it is now called "quantum mechanics".
WORK AT DUBLIN
Heisenberg's form of the theory is known as "matrix mechanics" and Schrödinger's as "wave mechanics." The latter requires less specialized mathematical equipment for its understanding, and it is not coincidence that "wave mechanics" and "quantum mechanics" are often used loosely as if synonymous.
Any bright young physicist of the present generation who may be overheard muttering about "psi" and "psi-star" is, in his own way, paying a tribute to Schrödinger. His wave equation, expressing the wave aspects of particles, is one of the great equations of physics, and in 1933 he shared a Nobel Prize with Professor P. A. M. Dirac, whose equation for the electron was a distinct and separate contribution of his own. The introduction of wave mechanics stands, however, as Schrödinger's monument and a worthy one
Erwin Rudolf Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887. The son of Rudolf Schrödinger, a botanist, he held several academic posts at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich. After holding several academic posts at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Berlin University in 1927 but had to leave when the Nazis came to power and settled in Britain. In 1938 he went to the United States, but in 1940 he took up the appointment of Senior Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He returned to Vienna to take up a professorship in 1956.
Among his published works are What is Life? (1944); Science and Humanism: Physics in our Time (1952); Nature and the Greeks (1954), and Mind and Matter (1958).
PHYSICIST AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
Professor Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner who was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1933 to 1938, died on Wednesday in Vienna, Reuters reports. He was 74.
Schrödinger was one of the joint founders of what became known as the "new" quantum theory. Put forward independently and in different forms by Professor Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925 and 1926 respectively, the theory has been of immense importance as it replaces the empirical but useful set of rules provided by the original quantum theory with a coherent theoretical structure. It completed the revolution in ideas which Max Planck had begun and which Niels Bohr had seized upon to provide, intuitively, what was at once seen to be a quantitatively useful account of atomic structure. The new theory enabled the predictions of the old to be reached by logical processes and provided means by which further predictions could be made with no further restriction than that imposed by the complexity of the calculations needed to apply it.
It was not chance that two men should have then developed at the same time what were later shown to be mathematically equivalent versions of the same theory. In 1924, de Broglie had boldly suggested that, just as it was necessary to consider electromagnetic radiation sometimes consisting of waves and sometimes as particles, it might be expected that matter waves should be associated with particles. Following the intuitive procedure characteristic of this period, he put forward a simple equation which predicted what the wavelength associated with, for example, an electron would be. This was at the same time the final chapter in the old quantum theory and a tacit invitation to anyone who could provide a wave theory of matter, or as it is now called "quantum mechanics".
WORK AT DUBLIN
Heisenberg's form of the theory is known as "matrix mechanics" and Schrödinger's as "wave mechanics." The latter requires less specialized mathematical equipment for its understanding, and it is not coincidence that "wave mechanics" and "quantum mechanics" are often used loosely as if synonymous.
Any bright young physicist of the present generation who may be overheard muttering about "psi" and "psi-star" is, in his own way, paying a tribute to Schrödinger. His wave equation, expressing the wave aspects of particles, is one of the great equations of physics, and in 1933 he shared a Nobel Prize with Professor P. A. M. Dirac, whose equation for the electron was a distinct and separate contribution of his own. The introduction of wave mechanics stands, however, as Schrödinger's monument and a worthy one
Erwin Rudolf Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887. The son of Rudolf Schrödinger, a botanist, he held several academic posts at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich. After holding several academic posts at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Berlin University in 1927 but had to leave when the Nazis came to power and settled in Britain. In 1938 he went to the United States, but in 1940 he took up the appointment of Senior Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He returned to Vienna to take up a professorship in 1956.
Among his published works are What is Life? (1944); Science and Humanism: Physics in our Time (1952); Nature and the Greeks (1954), and Mind and Matter (1958).
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