Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961)

Born on 12 August 1887 in Vienna, Erwin Schrödinger was a Nobel-winning physicist best known for his advances in wave mechanics and quantum entanglement. Schrödinger studied physics at the University of Vienna. After serving in the Austrian army in World War I, he resumed his career as a physicist, first as Max Wien’s assistant at the University of Jena. In 1926 Schrödinger published the first of four famous papers on wave mechanics in which he derived a wave equation for time-independent systems. As developed in those papers, wave mechanics shed light on the nature of the often counterintuitive quantum world. Schrödinger coined the term entanglement for the strange quantum connection between intertwined particles and devised the head-scratching thought experiment in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive. Schrödinger shared the 1933 physics Nobel with Paul Dirac for their “discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.” In his later years Schrödinger wrote several books. Among the most influential was What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1944), in which he proposed that life’s genetic information is stored in an aperiodic crystal. The book inspired Francis Crick and James Watson to search for that crystal, DNA. He died in 1961 at age 73. (Photo credit: Francis Simon, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 12 August 1887