The Vienna-born Erwin Schrodinger had sent papers on many topics from the trenches during his sevice as an artillery officer in WW1 – as mentioned in my essay of 2 weeks ago. By the mid-1920s he had been an important contributor to the new and revolutionary world of the quantum – along with Einstein and others.
By 1933, he had shared the Nobel prize with the English scientist, Paul Dirac, for his by now widely used Schrodinger equation. His work successfully described the world of the very tiny – wherein things like electrons or atoms, appear to behave like waves – unlike stones, rocks or tennis balls.
From the Schrodinger equation there had followed intriguing questions – and one example is “Schrodinger's cat”.
For background, consider a person leaving a playing field which has only two exit gates; the person can pass through only one gate, of course -- not both at the same time.
In the early 1800s Thomas Young had passed light through 2 narrow gates, or slits, and had found an interference pattern, which could be explained if light were considered a wave and if it had passed through both slits. In the 20th century it had been shown that tiny objects, like electrons, may also pass through 2 slits, and cause similar patterns.
In 1935 Schrodinger commented, in an essay in Die Naturwissenschaften [ref.1,p.308 [1935] that a cat in a box containing (quote) '… a diabolical apparatus that might poison the cat...' may be in the state of being dead, or alive, or both, until an observer actually opens the box.
Now the cat is certainly not tiny, but the point he was making is that if the wave description were given, then it had to include a mix of all possibilities. This superposition of states of existence means that the cat may not only be, for example, 100% dead or 100% alive, but might include a 50-50 mix. People even drew pictures of a live cat in the box as well as a prostrate one beside it. Of course, only when we open the box do we see that the cat can't be both alive and dead.
The Schrodinger theory works very well, today, in the realm of the tiny; with it, for example, we can successfully describe the probable states of the tiny electron in a hydrogen atom. But a cat is much too macroscopic to be described in such a way.
There is much more we could say about Schrodinger's-cat-in-the-box – such as, has the wave function 'collapsed' to a particular state just by our opening the box? Have we interfered with what was really going on, just by observing? Such questions are not completely answered even today.
Let's finish with a glimpse at the latter half of Schrodinger's life. Neither Schrodinger nor his wife Anny were Jewish, but the Nazis confiscated the pensions he had earned from both Vienna and Graz, and in 1939 he and Anny escaped to UK. He spent WW2 in Dublin, Ireland, as Director of the newly formed Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, remaining there for 17 years. (Fortunately he was able to speak English – his grandmother had been an English woman.) He continued teaching and research, poetry and philosophy, and amongst other things wrote the biophysics book “What is Life?” (also giving lectures on the BBC.) He and his wife never had children, and the Irish authorities turned a blind eye to the family occupying a house which included a 2nd woman, Mrs March, plus his daughter Ruth.
His popular book for relativists – "Space-Time Structure" – was published in Ireland in 1950.
Philosopher, poet, mathematician and student of Vedanta, Schrodinger had 2 more daughters in Ireland, by different women. Although always a declared atheist, he wrote (quote) '… we living beings all belong to one another ... [as] members or... aspects of a single being ... which, in the Upanishads is called Brahman, and in the western world is called God.' [Ibid, p.477.]
Finally, in good health most of his 73 years, he died of emphysema and TB, back home in his beloved Vienna in 1961.
I would like to thank the author – Dr Tarun Biswas – of an online Quantum text, for many helpful discussions.
References:
1. “Schrodinger; Life & Thought”, by Walter Moore; Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Dr. David Nightingale is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and is the co-author of the text, A Short Course in General Relativity.
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