He and his wife, Anny, fled Austria and eventually established themselves in Ireland, where Schrödinger joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin.ĭespite his political problems and frequent moves in the 1930s, Schrödinger continued to carry out his theoretical work. Eventually, in 1936, he decided to accept a post at the University of Graz in Austria, but when the Nazis invaded the country soon after, Schrödinger was dismissed due to his earlier affront to the party. He first went to Oxford, where he held a fellowship for a time, and was then offered a position at Princeton, but did not accept it. In 1933, however, Schrödinger decided to leave Germany due to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, even though, as a Catholic, he was not in any direct danger at the time. The year after Schrödinger published his groundbreaking work on wave mechanics, he was offered the prominent post previously held at the University of Berlin by Max Planck, which he accepted. However, there was a certain amount of dissidence among those in the field until Schrödinger proved that matrix mechanics and wave mechanics provided equivalent results, so that they were essentially the same theory expressed via different means. Due to this familiarity and the greater ease that it could be used to visualize atomic events, Schrödinger’s wave mechanics quickly gained acceptance by many physicists as an alternative to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. This idea led to Schrödinger’s notion that an electron wave would exhibit a fixed quantum of energy, an idea that was fundamental to the development of his wave mechanics, which were based upon calculations more familiar to most scientists than those used previously by Werner Heisenberg to establish his opposing matrix mechanics explanation of electrons. Influenced by de Broglie’s work, which had gained additional weight due to the support of Albert Einstein, Schrödinger attributed the quantum energies of the electron orbits in the atom thought to exist to the vibration frequencies of electron matter waves, now known as de Broglie waves, around the nucleus of the atom. Prior to de Broglie’s work, several scientists were convinced of the duality of light, but he was the first to suggest that the same was true for other forms of matter. According to de Broglie, electrons and other forms of matter exhibit a dual nature that enables them to sometimes behave as particles and sometimes as waves. Within the document was a groundbreaking theory that helped revolutionize the field and led Schrödinger to develop the famous equations that carry his name.
In 1924, a French graduate student named Louis de Broglie completed his thesis on quantum physics.
Five years later, Schrödinger would develop his foundational work in the field of quantum wave mechanics. Following his military service, in 1921, he settled in Zurich, where he taught at the university. In 1910, Schrödinger received his doctorate and accepted a research post, but was obliged to leave upon the outbreak of World War I. Subsequently he entered the University of Vienna, where he studied mathematics, analytical mechanics, and theoretical physics. In 1898, Schrödinger was enrolled at the Akademisches Gymnasium, graduating from the institution in 1906 with a broad education. Thus, he was bilingual at a very early age and was initially educated at home by a private tutor. Born in Vienna, Schrödinger was raised in a household where both English and German were commonly spoken, his mother being part English and part Austrian. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger made fundamental advances in establishing the groundwork of the wave mechanics approach to quantum theory. Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Timeline - Erwin Schrödinger