Thursday, September 2, 2010

Erwin Schroedinger

So apparently this Erwin Schroedinger is a BEAST!! He is really smart and did some pretty cool stuff with the atom and physics and a bunch of other stuff. So if you have recently discovered how interesting tiny, invisible particles and their discoverers are like me then I am sure you are wondering who this guy is and why he is as a said before a BEAST!! So instead of making you go look him up on google I have summarized it up right below this intro. Just keep on reading. You will see it soon and the faster I shut up the faster you will see it. I will shut up now.
Erwin Schroedinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist who is known as a father of quantum mechanics. He came up with the Schroedinger Equation and won a Nobel prize for it in 1933. He was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer (a German philosopher). A crazy theory that Schroedinger performed was called Schroedinger's cat. Schroedinger's Cat was a famous "illustration" of quantum theory and superposition. It demonstrates the conflict between what quantum theory says about nature and what we see under a microscope. Oddly enough he valued the "beauty" of German poetry and the "severe logic" of ancient grammar. In 1906 -1906 he attended the University of Vienna and came under the influence of Fritz Hasenohrl (a Boltzmann's successor). In 1927 he moved to Berlin because there was a lot of scientific activity going on there at that point. It was there that he took weekly colloquies with much older and more experienced scientists. After Hitler started to try to ruin the world Schroedinger moved to England and continued his studies there. He was then offered a job at Princeton and a job at University of Graz. After much deliberation he ended up taking the one at University of Graz. After the Annexation of Austria he fled to Italy and continued teaching at Oxford and University of Ghent. He then moved to Dublin and became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics. He retired in Dublin in 1955. He later moved back to Vienna with his wife of thirty years, Annemarie Bertel. He died in Vienna at the age of seventy three.

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