PHYSICS: Erwin Schrödinger 1933 - Vienna, AUSTRIA - Nobel Laureates on Waymarking.com

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger , 1887 Vienna - 1961 Vienna.

Schrödinger's mother was half Austrian and half English, he learned English and German almost at the same time due to the fact that both were spoken in the family household. In 1914 Schrödinger achieved Habilitation and served then 1914-1918 in the Austrian army. 1920-1921 he taught in Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau. In 1921, he moved to the University of Zürich.

In January 1926, Schrödinger published in the Annalen der Physik the paper "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem" [tr. Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem] on wave mechanics and what is now known as the Schrödinger equation. In this paper he gave a "derivation" of the wave equation for time independent systems, and showed that it gave the correct energy eigenvalues for the hydrogen-like atom. This paper has been universally celebrated as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century, and created a revolution in quantum mechanics, and indeed of all physics and chemistry. A second paper was submitted just four weeks later that solved the quantum harmonic oscillator, the rigid rotor and the diatomic molecule, and gives a new derivation of the Schrödinger equation. A third paper in May showed the equivalence of his approach to that of Heisenberg and gave the treatment of the Stark effect. A fourth paper in this most remarkable series showed how to treat problems in which the system changes with time, as in scattering problems. These papers were the central achievement of his career and were at once recognized as having great significance by the physics community.

In 1927, he succeeded Max Planck at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1933, however, Schrödinger decided to leave Germany; he disliked the Nazis' anti-semitism. He became a Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Soon after he arrived, he received the Nobel Prize together with Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In 1935, after extensive correspondence with personal friend Albert Einstein, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

Schrödinger took up a position at the University of Graz in Austria in 1936, but in 1939 the university in Graz dismissed him from his job for political unreliability. He suffered harassment and received instructions not to leave the country, but he and his wife fled to Italy. From there he went to visiting positions in Oxford and Ghent Universities. In 1940 he received an invitation to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. He moved to Clontarf, Dublin and became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics and remained there for 17 years, during which time he became a naturalized Irish citizen. He wrote about 50 further publications on various topics, including his explorations of unified field theory.

In 1956, he returned to Vienna and died there on 4 January 1961 of tuberculosis at the age of 73. He was buried in Alpbach, Austria.

Source: Wikipedia