Schrödinger wrote his famous wave equation while recovering in a Swiss sanatorium
Tuberculosis sent Erwin Schrödinger to a sanatorium in Arosa several times in the 1920s, and there he worked out the equation at the heart of quantum mechanics. He later coined the term entanglement, dreamed up a cat both alive and dead, and wrote a small book that inspired James Watson to chase the gene.
Schrödinger was born in Vienna on 12 August 1887, the only child of a botanist and the daughter of a chemistry professor; an English grandmother taught him English. He took his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1910 and served as an artillery officer in World War I. After posts in Jena and Zurich he succeeded Max Planck in Berlin in 1927. His equation lets physicists calculate a system's wave function and how it evolves over time, and in 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Paul Dirac.
That same year he left Germany because he strongly objected to Nazi antisemitism, taking a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His unconventional household, living with both his wife and a mistress, may have caused trouble there. In 1935, after long correspondence with Albert Einstein, he proposed the cat thought experiment and coined quantum entanglement. He moved to Graz, but the German annexation of Austria in 1938 forced him to flee again.
Ireland offered refuge. At the personal invitation of Éamon de Valera, he became director of theoretical physics at the new Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1940 and stayed until retiring in 1955. There he wrote What Is Life? in 1944, discussing negative entropy and imagining a complex molecule carrying the genetic code; Watson credited it with inspiring his research. Though an atheist, Schrödinger was drawn to Eastern religions and pantheism and saw his science as an intellectual approach to the divine.
He returned to Vienna in 1956 as professor emeritus and, sceptical of nuclear power, once swapped a scheduled talk on the subject for a philosophical lecture. He died of tuberculosis on 4 January 1961, aged 73. His reputation carries a shadow: in 1989, allegations emerged that he had sexually abused several minors. A Physics World poll ranked him joint eighth among the greatest physicists, alongside Dirac.
Source: Erwin Schrödinger
