Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (UK: /ˈʃrɜːdɪŋər, ˈʃroʊdɪŋər/, US: /ˈʃroʊdɪŋər/;[3] German: [ˈɛɐ̯vɪn ˈʃʁøːdɪŋɐ]; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was an Austrian-Irish theoretical physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory.

[11][12] Spending most of his life as an academic with positions at various universities, Schrödinger, along with Paul Dirac, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 for his work on quantum mechanics, the same year he left Germany due to his opposition to Nazism.

Subsequently, until 1938, he had a position in Graz, Austria, until the Nazi takeover when he fled, finally finding a long-term arrangement in Dublin, Ireland, where he remained until retirement in 1955, and where he sexually abused several minors.

[19] Between 1906 and 1910 (the year he earned his doctorate) Schrödinger studied at the University of Vienna under the physicists Franz S. Exner (1849–1926) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915).

Between 1914 and 1918 he participated in war work as a commissioned officer in the Austrian fortress artillery (Gorizia, Duino, Sistiana, Prosecco, Vienna).

His position at Oxford did not work out well; his unconventional domestic arrangements, sharing living quarters with two women,[20] were not met with acceptance.

[22] In the midst of these tenure issues in 1935, after extensive correspondence with Albert Einstein, he proposed what is now called the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment.

[32] In 1944, he wrote What Is Life?, which contains a discussion of negentropy and the concept of a complex molecule with the genetic code for living organisms.

Similarly, Francis Crick, in his autobiographical book What Mad Pursuit, described how he was influenced by Schrödinger's speculations about how genetic information might be stored in molecules.

During this period, Schrödinger turned from mainstream quantum mechanics' definition of wave–particle duality and promoted the wave idea alone, causing much controversy.

Although he was not Catholic, the priest in charge of the cemetery permitted the burial after learning Schrödinger was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

One of Schrödinger's grandchildren, Terry Rudolph, has followed in his footsteps as a quantum physicist, and teaches at Imperial College London.

"Erwin tried to persuade her to have the child; he said he would take care of it, but he did not offer to divorce [wife] Anny... in desperation, Ithi arranged for an abortion."

A 2021 Irish Times article summarized this as a "predilection for teenage girls", and denounced Schrödinger as "a serial abuser whose behaviour fitted the profile of a paedophile in the widely understood sense of that term".

[48] Schrödinger's grandson and his mother were unhappy with the accusation made by Moore, and once the biography was published, their family broke off contact with him.

[49] Carlo Rovelli notes in his book Helgoland that Schrödinger "always kept a number of relationships going at once – and made no secret of his fascination with preadolescent girls".

In Ireland, Rovelli writes, he fathered children from two students[50] identified in a Der Standard article as being a 26-year-old and a married political activist of unknown age.

[citation needed] In the first years of his career, Schrödinger became acquainted with the ideas of the old quantum theory, developed in the works of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Arnold Sommerfeld, and others.

In January 1921, Schrödinger finished his first article on this subject, about the framework of the Bohr–Sommerfeld quantization of the interaction of electrons on some features of the spectra of the alkali metals.

In autumn 1922, he analyzed the electron orbits in an atom from a geometric point of view, using methods developed by his friend Hermann Weyl.

This work, in which it was shown that quantum orbits are associated with certain geometric properties, was an important step in predicting some of the features of wave mechanics.

Earlier in the same year, he created the Schrödinger equation of the relativistic Doppler effect for spectral lines, based on the hypothesis of light quanta and considerations of energy and momentum.

Although the Bothe–Geiger coincidence experiment soon cast doubt on this, the idea of energy as a statistical concept was a lifelong attraction for Schrödinger, and he discussed it in some reports and publications.

This paper has been universally celebrated as one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century and created a revolution in most areas of quantum mechanics and indeed of all physics and chemistry.

A second paper was submitted just four weeks later that solved the quantum harmonic oscillator, rigid rotor, and diatomic molecule problems and gave a new derivation of the Schrödinger equation.

A third paper, published in May, showed the equivalence of his approach to that of Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and gave the treatment of the Stark effect.

David L. MacAdam, MIT Press (1970) and in Erwin Schrödinger’s Color Theory, Translated with Modern Commentary, Ed.

[69]Schrödinger discussed topics such as consciousness, the mind–body problem, sense perception, free will, and objective reality in his lectures and writings.

[72] Some commentators have suggested that Schrödinger was so deeply immersed in a non-dualist Vedântic-like view that it may have served as a broad framework or subliminal inspiration for much of his work including that in theoretical physics.

[72] Schrödinger expressed sympathy for the idea of Tat Tvam Asi, stating "you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.