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Erwin Schrodinger: Physicist Erwin Schrodinger
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Physicist Erwin Schrodinger had a knack for taking complex ideas and making them easy to understand. To illustrate the wacky world of quantum physics, for example, he told a story about an unfortunate feline that was both dead and alive--his famous "cat paradox." And in 1944, he helped unravel the central mystery of biology in a little book called What Is Life?
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The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, thought of a paradox to show that quantum mechanics doesn't apply to larger, tangible things. He envisioned a cat locked in a steel chamber with a tiny amount of radioactive material, a Geiger counter, and a diabolical device designed so that if the Geiger counter detects a radioactive decay, it activates a hammer that breaks a flask of acid and poisons the cat.
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To illustrate quantum mechanics' strange nature, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed in 1926 a puzzling thought experiment. If a cat is placed in a sealed box and its fate--to live or die--is correlated with whether or not an atom radioactively decays, then the presence of the atom's decayed and undecayed quantum states translates into a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive--a highly counterintuitive idea.
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Erwin Schrodinger, for whom the lecture is named, was an Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac.
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Physicist Erwin Schrodinger