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Erwin Schrödinger

1887-1961

Hannah ConwellCourtney Harris

Born on August 12, 1887 in Vienna, Austria

Child of botanist and oil cloth factory owner Rudolf Schrödinger and Gerogine Emilia Brenda

Erwin was taught by private teachers until he was 11

Went to the University of Vienna where he studied physics

Early Life

Focused primarily on the study of physics and was strong influenced by Fritz Hasenohrl

Graduated with a Ph.D. in physics in 1910 Worked for a few years at various institutions

as an assistant but was drafted into World War 1 in 1914

Returning to civilian life, Schrödinger married Annemarie Bertel in 1920

He also took on a number of postions at different universities, before joining the University of Zurich in 1921

He came upon the work of Louis de Broglie in 1925, which sparked his interest in explaining that an electron in an atom would move as a wave.

The following year, he wrote a revolutionary paper that we know as the Schrodinger wave equation.

He was a theoretical physicist and scholar who came up with a groundbreaking wave equation for electron movements.

Later became a director at Ireland’s institute for advanced studies

In 1926, Schrödinger published a remarkable series of four papers in the prestigious “Annalen der Physik” journal

marked the central achievement of his career

Published Works

Devised a hypothetical experiment in 1935 where a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter, and a bottle of poison

If the Geiger counter detects the radioactive material has decayed it would then trigger the smashing of a bottle of poison that would kill the cat

Experiment designed to illustrate the flaws of Copenhagen interpretation by Bohr, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until it is observed

Schrodinger’s cat

Niels Bohr proposed a solution to create the events we all observe. He assumed that conscious observation caused events.

If Copenhagen is correct it would suggest that radioactive material could have decayed and not decayed in a sealed environment all at once

An observer would not know if the cat is dead or alive until the box is opened

This would suggest that the cat is both alive and dead until it is opened

Discredited the Copenhagen interpretation

Furthered the wave-particle theory Derived an equation that treated the

hydrogen atoms’ electron as a wave Combined the equations for the behavior

of waves The model limits an electron’s energy to

certain values Unlike Bohr’s, his model makes no

attempt to describe the electron’s path around the nucleus

Quantum Mechanical Model

Instead of trying to tell us where the electron is at any time, the model describes the probability that an electron can be found in a given region of space at a given time.

The model longer tells us where the electron is; it only tells us where it might be

Contribution

Defines something called the wave function of a particle or system which has a certain value at every point in space for every given time

These values have no physical meaning, yet the wave function contains all information that can be known about a particle or system

This information can be found by mathematically manipulating the wave function to return real values relating to physical properties

Wave Equation or Schrödinger Equation

The wave function can be thought as a picture of how this particle or system acts with time and describes it as fully as possible

The wave function can be in a number of different states at once

A particle may have many different positions, energies, velocities or other physical property at the same time but only measured at one time

“Complex Wave”

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 was awarded jointly to Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory“ (his complex wave equation)

Nobel Prize

RIP

http://www.biography.com/people/erwin-schr%C3%B6dinger-9475545#his-own-wave-equation-

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/

http://journeymanphilosopher.blogspot.com/2011/05/trying-to-understand-schrodingers.html

http://fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect20/preface.html

Work Cited