Schrödinger: Life and Thought

by Walter J. Moore

Book Overview

Erwin Schr?dinger was a brilliant and charming Austrian, a great scientist, and a man with a passionate interest in people and ideas. In this, the first comprehensive biography of Schr?dinger, Walter... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052135434X
• ISBN13: 9780521354349
• Release Date: July 1989
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Great physicist - dubious kind of guy

I was impressed by the freshness of Moore's writing and his diligence in unearthing the daily life of Erwin Schrodinger over so many years. What do you make of a guy who spent his life falling in love easily with so many women and then seducing them? A man who in his forties suffers what Moore euphemistically calls a 'Lolita complex'? He ends up with three daughters, none by his wife, who he remains married to until the end. At least the girls got good intellectual genes. Schrodinger was no friend to the concept of 'bourgeois marriage', and it might be argued in these enlightened times that he was doing nothing wrong. However, his lifelong self-centred and adolescent attitude to relationships led to collateral damage to many (not all) of the woman with whom he involved himself. Typically it was the younger or less well-educated who were left holding the baby, or worse. His work was mostly blindingly competent in the spirit of mathematical physics. A strong visualiser, he was close in philosophy to Einstein and had little patience with the Bohr-Born interpretation of his wave equation. His culture, approach, techniques and beliefs all seem curiously dated now, but this was a first rate scientific biography. This version of the book has the physics as well as the sex. The level is not particularly daunting ... first degree in physics or maths is fine.

The Great Mind: Erwin Schrodinger

If there is some way I could rate this book as five star plus, then I would love to do that. This is a very well researched book by an author who makes a passionate presentation of the mind and work of one of the greatest physicists of 20th century. Erwin Schrodinger is an enigmatic figure, a brilliant scientist, philosopher, poet and a humanist who lead a complex personal life; several love affairs allowed and approved by; his wife Annemarie, and husbands of his girlfriends. The author has examined and reviewed many archived materials from Schrodinger's family, friends, and universities/academic institutions who knew Schrödinger. The reader becomes fascinated by sheer brilliance, wisdom, sadness, and struggle in personal and professional life of Schrödinger. Schrodinger was deeply philosophical in his thoughts than any other scientist of his time, but he apparently did not make far-reaching philosophical conclusions from his work in quantum physics. He was held back because he knew there was a lack of clarity. Schrödinger was deeply influenced by the thoughts of Schopenhauer, and developed strong interest in Buddhist philosophy and Vedanta (one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy.) Schrodinger intensively studied the works of Schopenhauer, Henry Warren, Max Welleser, Richard Garbe, Paul Deussen, Max Muller, and Rhys Davids to understand Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. Erwin's interest in Vedanta and Upanishads started at a young age when he was accustomed to cold hungry time in war-torn Vienna. His search for the truth never reached conclusion as his one time lover Hansi Bauer noted, but his belief in Vedanta remained the same since 1920 until his death. He was a life long believer of Vedanta. He lashed out Christian churches accusing them of gross superstition in their belief of individual souls. Quantum physics has tremendous philosophical implications, which revolutionized modern thought in science and philosophy because it did not agree with the philosophy of materialism expounded by Newton. Interpretation of quantum world suggested that strict determinism and predictability is not an accurate description of reality, and consciousness is an integral part of the laws of quantum physics. In other words, the human observer (biological system) and the observed (rest of the universe) is not merely a biological (cognition) phenomenon but more than that. One can not actually derive the Schrödinger wave equation from classical physics. It is a justification and hence the final equation is used to calculate the energy levels that fit the experimental results such as the observed UV spectra of a hydrogen atom. Schrodinger developed relativistic equation first and then the non-relativistic equation. The relativistically framed (without spin) equation did not agree with the experimental result because it did not include electron spin. It was not known at that time that electron has a spin. This equation was good for a particle with no spin and it

Scientific and sexual fireworks.

This is a masterful biography, but one need to have a profound knowledge of higher mathematics and a basic one in physics to fully understand it. Walter Moore shows that Schrödinger's life and thought was at least controversial. Life Schrödinger's personal itinerary is exemplary for the 20th century. He was born in a comfortable upper-middle class, but his parents lost their savings in the German inflation after WW I. The result was famine and diseases. It marked the rest of his life. As a young man he was confronted with unemployment and nearly left physics for financial reasons! He found a decent job only at the age of 34. Even after winning the Nobel Prize he was still confronted with 'pension' problems. Science Walter Moore gives us a magisterial and detailed analysis of the scientific discoveries of ES, from his humble beginnings to the elaboration of the quantum wave function and after. It shows that ES was above all a mathematical genius and a not so brilliant experimenter. ES remained all his life opposed to the complemantary (particle/wave) interpretation of quantum mechanics (the 'Kopenhagen oracle' for ES). For him, there were only waves! Sex Beside science, sex was the principal occupation of his life, with all combinations imaginable. He lived a ménage à trois and sometimes à quatre, but still fell in love with other women, also with very young ones for he had a Lolita complex. He could without doubt have been accused of paedophilia. But his intense love affairs stimulated highly his scientific creativity. One can only wonder if his 'wild' behaviour and negative view of bourgeois marriage were not fundamentally influenced by the fact that he couldn't marry his first true love, because her family found that he was too poor! Politics He had a deep contempt for the governing classes (politicians, clergy) who 'enslave men by violence and use the religious desire of many people to promote superstition to rule over the dispossessed'. He also distrusted democracy! Philosophical world view This is certainly one of the strangest aspects of his thoughts. He was convinced that physics provided absolutely no answers to philosophical questions (e. g. free will). All his life he remained, like Einstein, an adept of determinism. His philosophical views and ethical principles were completely dissociated from his real life! As an adept of the Vedanta, he believed the Buddhist wisdom that a thing could be both A and non-A (horribile dictu)! He was also heavily influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer. This work gives excellent explanations of the Vedanta, and the philosophy of Mach and Schopenhauer. It contains a very painful paragraph on Heidegger. I see only one minus point: the author doesn't give Bohr's pertinent response to the EPR-article against the Copenhagen interpretation of qm. This is a brilliant book and certainly the definitive biography of Schrödinger. It is by no means a hagiography and doesn't dodge some 'weird' aspects o

....WOW

This book, is amazing. I came across it because I was forced to do a project for chemistry on Erwin Schrödinger, and I'm glad I did. It's a 512 page biography of him, and I think that says it all. It covers and extensive amount of ground, and is very useful for anyone doing any researh on the man. It gives a lot of background information about what was going on in his life, and the events in the world around him. Whenever he went to a new college, there was always some information on the college itself. If Schrödinger did research on a topic, there would be a small history on the scientist that came before him and how they affected him. The book is virtually packed with quotes form other people, letters, and speeches. One of the other things I liked was that it contained details of Schrödinger's personal life, such as his extramarital affairs and details on his marriage, and his family history. Want to see some pictures? There's that too. Bet you didn't know that Schrödinger wrote poetry. Well he did, and all of it is here too, in both German and an English translation. Another thing that makes the book stand out it that it is bery readable. Walter Moore did an excellent job writing the book, and it shows. I can say that you only need to read one book about Schrödinger: this one.

I tawt I taw a putty tat!

The 20th century has boasted a greater number of top-notch physicists than any prior epoch in history. The 21st century, and any future century beyond it, will be hard-pressed to match the level of scientific genius presented by the 20th. Names such as John Archibald Wheeler, Eugene Wigner, Paul Dirac, Max Planck, Louis deBroglie, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Hawking have set the standard for scientific and intellectual excellence.Another name which belongs in this esteemed list is that of Erwin Schroedinger. Schroedinger influenced the field of quantum mechanics perhaps more than any other single scientific contributor of modern times. Here, Walter Moore has compiled his unique story so that all may have access to the life and times of this extraordinary man.Moore's writing style is easily up to the task of keeping the interest of the reader. He does an excellent job of tracing Schroedinger's academic career as he obtained posts at the university of Jena, university of Zurich, university of Berlin [he was the hand-picked successor of none other than Max Planck], university of Oxford, university of Graz (Austria), the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the university of Vienna. Schroedinger was also offered professorships at 2 US universities as well (university of Wisconsin, Madison and Princeton university), but declined both. Moore does an exquisite job in his disinterment of all the facts, personal factors and politics behind S' decisions to transfer (or not to transfer) from post to post. Moore's elucidation of S' relationship with the Nazis (who called him "Politically unreliable") is exemplery, as is his coverage of the friendships and correspondence that S shared with his peers.What makes Moore's biography superb is that he equally concentrates on S' personal life as well as his intellectual endeavors. Moore gives an authentic and upfront treatment of S' rather bizarre love arrangements. Like the composer Richard Wagner, S had many affairs with the wives of his friends (a few of which resulted in children), as well as myriad young woman just reaching adulthood. Moore offers a credible psycho-analysis of the motivations for his sexual conquests, and comparisons to the behavior of the persona in Nabokov's "Lolita" which Moore alludes to are certainly warranted.Like all good modern biographies, the book is filled with plenty of pictures of the personages and locales which were integrated within S' life [including the immortal assemblage of the 1927 (5th) Solvay conference]. Also, for the mathematically inclined amongst us, the work is filled with a good many of the equations that S developed and worked on during his lifetime. The good news, for those of us not so mathematically inclined, is that an understanding of them is not essential to a generic comprehension of what S accomplished.I cannot recommend this