Who is schrodinger

It was also his most fruitful period, being actively engaged in a variety of subjects of theoretical physics. For this work he shared with Dirac the Nobel Prize for He came to England and for a while held a fellowship at Oxford.

In he was invited to lecture at Princeton University and was offered a permanent position there, but did not accept. In he was offered a position at University of Graz, which he accepted only after much deliberation and because his longing for his native country outweighed his caution.

With the annexation of Austria in , he was immediately in difficulty because his leaving Germany in was taken to be an unfriendly act. Soon afterwards he managed to escape to Italy, from where he proceeded to Oxford and then to University of Ghent. After a short stay he moved to the newly created Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, where he became Director of the School for Theoretical Physics. He remained in Dublin until his retirement in Unfortunately, many popularizers of science in our day have embraced the absurdity of Schrodinger's Cat and claim that this is how the world really works.

In quantum theory, quantum particles can exist in a superposition of states at the same time and collapse down to a single state upon interaction with other particles. Some scientists at the time that quantum theory was being developed 's drifted from science into the realm of philosophy, and stated that quantum particles only collapse to a single state when viewed by a conscious observer. Schrodinger found this concept absurd and devised his thought experiment to make plain the absurd yet logical outcome of such claims.

In Schrodinger's imaginary experiment, you place a cat in a box with a tiny bit of radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, it triggers a Geiger counter which causes a poison or explosion to be released that kills the cat. Now, the decay of the radioactive substance is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This means that the atom starts in a combined state of "going to decay" and "not going to decay".

If we apply the observer-driven idea to this case, there is no conscious observer present everything is in a sealed box , so the whole system stays as a combination of the two possibilities. Until then, its properties, such as momentum, are encoded in a mathematical object known as a wave function that essentially says: if you make a measurement, here are a range of possible outcomes. The inevitable question that arose as the theory developed was: what, then, is the thing doing before that?

The most prominent answer in the s came from the Copenhagen interpretation , developed in the Danish city by luminaries of quantum theory, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. This says that there really is no definitive reality before the measurement, and the object is in an undefined state known as a superposition.