January 4, 1961 - Death of Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize developed an atomic model, an equation named after him, and the famous cat mental experiment

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger studied physics and philosophy in Vienna between 1906 and 1910.

At the end of 1911, after a year of military service in the Austrian army, he returned to his former institute, teaching physics and working in the laboratories.

In 1914 he was qualified to become Privatdozent, but the First World War postponed his career in physics to return to service in the army.

In 1917, he became a professor of meteorology at the Officers' Academy, which left him plenty of time to read professional literature and work on scientific problems.

After working in various positions, he became head of the prestigious Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich in 1921.

In 1926 he proposed his non-relativistic quantum atomic model. In this model, electrons were originally seen as a standing wave of matter whose amplitude decayed rapidly as it exceeded the atomic radius.

In the same year, he published an article entitled ‘Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem’ in the prestigious journal ‘Annalen der Physik’ on the quantization of the eigenvector problem of wave mechanics, which was to become the Schrödinger Equation.

In 1927, the notoriety generated by his groundbreaking work led to Schrödinger becoming Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin, which had become vacant after Max Planck's resignation and after beating Arnold Sommerfeld in the application process. In Berlin, he found friends and allies who shared his conservative view of quantum mechanics and did not recognise the interpretation put forward by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and others (the so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’).

In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Paul Dirac, for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

In 1935, after extensive correspondence with his friend Albert Einstein, he proposed to publish the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat, to illustrate the problems of the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics when attempting to apply it to the description of phenomena on a macroscopic scale.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Erwin Schrödinger