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.
As an Austrian artillery officer on the Italian front in World War I, Schrödinger might have bombarded ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway. Or not.
After the war, Schrödinger oscillated from job to job before getting a professorship at the University of Zurich. 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 wrote to Einstein in Berlin and proposed the term Wellenmechanik, or “wave mechanics.” It’s a fundamental building block of modern quantum and subatomic physics.
The year 1926 was astonishingly fertile for Schrödinger, much like Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis (see here). 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 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 there, Schrödinger won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Paul Dirac). Unfortunately, Oxford did not take to its new laureate: the dons seemed to mind that Schrödinger was living with two women. He returned to Austria to take a position at the University of Graz, but he was dismissed after Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He lived and taught in Ireland until 1956, when he returned to his homeland for his last five years.
Did Schrödinger, at any time, have a cat? He might have.—RA