Schrodinger's Quotes & Sayings

So what I'm saying is why don't we think about changing Schrodinger's equation at some level when masses become too big at the level that you might have to worry about Einstein's general relativity. — Roger Penrose

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors. — Erwin Schrodinger

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am. — Erwin Schrodinger

The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists. — Erwin Schrodinger

Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious. — Erwin Schrodinger

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. — Erwin Schrodinger

proportional to the absolute temperature, in quantitative agreement with theory (Curie's law). — Erwin Schrodinger

This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins [wise men or priests in the Vedic tradition] express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world. — Erwin Schrodinger

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic; — Erwin Schrodinger

Though the single atoms change their orientation incessantly, they produce on the average (owing to their enormous number) a constant small preponderance of orientation in the direction of the field and proportional to it. — Erwin Schrodinger

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat. — Jeanette Winterson

How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what? — Erwin Schrodinger

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. — Erwin Schrodinger

The physicist is familiar with the fact that the classical laws of physics are modified by quantum theory, especially at low temperature. There are many instances of this. Life seems to be one of them, a particularly striking one. Life seems to be orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up. — Erwin Schrodinger

It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, Who are we? — Erwin Schrodinger

The present is the only things that has no end. — Erwin Schrodinger

An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish. — Erwin Schrodinger

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go. — Terry Pratchett

Each electron wants the whole of three-dimensional space for its waves; so Schrodinger generously allows three dimensions for each of them. For two electrons he requires a six-dimensional sub-aether. He then successfully applies his method on the same lines as before. I think you will see now that Schrodinger has given us what seemed to be a comprehensible physical picture only to snatch it away again. His sub-aether does not exist in physical space; it is in a 'configuration space' imagined by the mathematician for the purpose of solving his problems, and imagined afresh with different numbers of dimensions according to the problem proposed. It was only an accident that in the earliest problems considered the configuration space had a close correspondence with physical space, suggesting some degree of objective reality of the waves. Schrodinger's wave mechanics is not a physical theory but a dodge - and a very good dodge too. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

I insist upon the view that 'all is waves'. — Erwin Schrodinger

Tell me this," I said. "My world. It's not like the one I read about in the oldest books. When they talk about magic, about ghosts, it's as if they are fairy-tales to frighten children. And yet I have seen the dead walk, seen a boy bring fire with just a thought."
Fexler frowned as if considering how to explain. "Think of reality as a ship whose course is set, whose wheel is locked in place by universal constants. Our greatest achievement, and downfall, was to turn that wheel, just a fraction. The role of the observer was always important - we discovered that. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it, then it is both standing and not standing. The cat is both alive and dead."
"Who mentioned a fecking cat? — Mark Lawrence

disorderly experience we should have if our senses were susceptible to the impact of a few molecules only. — Erwin Schrodinger

I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it. — Erwin Schrodinger

Plato was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it - against reason - as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience ... — Erwin Schrodinger

Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat's still inside. — Emily St. John Mandel

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness. — Erwin Schrodinger

ORDER BASED ON ORDER — Erwin Schrodinger

What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. — Erwin Schrodinger

No self is of itself alone — Erwin Schrodinger

The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it — Erwin Schrodinger

entropy taken with a negative sign', which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann's original argument turned. — Erwin Schrodinger

Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. — Erwin Schrodinger

The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details. — Erwin Schrodinger

He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism ... — Walter J. Moore

I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science. — Erwin Schrodinger

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it ... — Erwin Schrodinger

Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better. — Erwin Schrodinger

Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind ... — Erwin Schrodinger

In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.
If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten. — Erwin Schrodinger

Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine. — Erwin Schrodinger

The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment. — Erwin Schrodinger

The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information ... [but] it cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us ... the scientific worldview contains of itself ... not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination. — Erwin Schrodinger

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. — Erwin Schrodinger

The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy ... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object ... — Erwin Schrodinger

However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring. — Erwin Schrodinger

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is. — Erwin Schrodinger

Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural. — Erwin Schrodinger

The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder. — Erwin Schrodinger

Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence. — Erwin Schrodinger

THE STRIKING CONTRAST In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation. — Erwin Schrodinger

The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model. — Erwin Schrodinger

It has been explained in chapter 1 that the laws of physics, as we know them, are statistical laws.2 They have a lot to do with the natural tendency of things to go over into disorder. — Erwin Schrodinger

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM — Erwin Schrodinger

I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them. — Erwin Schrodinger

All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms. — Erwin Schrodinger

When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply — Erwin Schrodinger

An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.) — Erwin Schrodinger

The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West. — Erwin Schrodinger

From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any "new force" or what not, directing the behavior of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. — Erwin Schrodinger

If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian| warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men - and cowards. — Erwin Schrodinger

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary ... — Erwin Schrodinger

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.
... Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't. — Erwin Schrodinger

It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces 'order from disorder' and the new one, producing 'order from order'. — Erwin Schrodinger

Thus 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. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to the new striving and suffering. And not merely "some day." Now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. — Erwin Schrodinger

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. — Erwin Schrodinger

If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless. — Erwin Schrodinger

The spread, both in width and depth, of the
multifarious branches of knowledge during
the last hundred odd years has confronted us
with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we
are only now beginning to acquire reliable
material for welding together the sum total of all
that is known into a whole; but, on the other
hand, it has become next to impossible for a
single mind fully to command more than a small
specialized portion of it. I can see no other
escape from this dilemma ... than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. — Erwin Schrodinger

The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. — Erwin Schrodinger

And so, whereas Bohr and the Copenhagen gang would argue that only one of these universes would exist (because the act of measurement, which they claim lies outside of Schrodinger's purview, would collapse away all the others), and whereas a first-pass attempt to go beyond Bohr and extend Schrodinger's math to all particles, including those constituting equipment and brains, yielded dizzying confusion (because a given machine or mind seemed to internalize all possible outcomes simultaneously), Everett found that a more careful reading of Schrodinger's math leads somewhere else: to a plentiful reality populated by an ever-growing collection of universes. — Brian Greene

A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries, — Erwin Schrodinger

The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday. — Erwin Schrodinger

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture. — Erwin Schrodinger

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. — Erwin Schrodinger

Our mind, by virtue of a certain finite, limited capability, is by no means capable of putting a question to Nature that permits a continuous series of answers. The observations, the individual results of measurements, are the answers of Nature to our discontinuous questioning. — Erwin Schrodinger

Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. ... Nature does not act by purposes. — Erwin Schrodinger

Bohr's standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves. — Erwin Schrodinger

He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive. — Walter J. Moore

In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ... — Erwin Schrodinger

You might argue that my example is bad because Einstein is dead. But according to physicist Erwin Schrodinger, Einstein is neither dead nor alive until we dig him up and open the casket. If he's alive, he might want his brain back, which I understand is in a Ziplock bag in some guy's freezer. And this is a perfect example of why examples always distract from the main point. — Scott Adams

Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life", but not so mind. — Erwin Schrodinger

[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment. — Erwin Schrodinger

The total number of minds in the universe is one. — Erwin Schrodinger

But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. — Erwin Schrodinger

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting. — Terry Pratchett

The organism feeds on negative entropy. — Erwin Schrodinger

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. — Terry Pratchett

We have inherited from our forefathers the keen
longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. — Erwin Schrodinger

We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny. If we want it, we must do something about it. — Erwin Schrodinger

In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period. — Erwin Schrodinger

Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought. — Erwin Schrodinger

In this communication I wish first to show in the simplest case of the hydrogen atom (nonrelativistic and undistorted) that the usual rates for quantization can be replaced by another requirement, in which mention of "whole numbers" no longer occurs. Instead the integers occur in the same natural way as the integers specifying the number of nodes in a vibrating string. The new conception can be generalized, and I believe it touches the deepest meaning of the quantum rules. — Erwin Schrodinger

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. — Freeman Dyson

Entanglement is not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum
mechanics. — Erwin Schrodinger

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and - as a special class within the whole - mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment ... by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty. — Erwin Schrodinger

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. — Erwin Schrodinger

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. — Marshall McLuhan

No. I do not think that. For the new principle that is involved is a genuinely physical one: it is, in my opinion, nothing else than the principle of quantum theory over again. — Erwin Schrodinger

Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.
She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?"
"Alive," I say. — John Green

There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. — Erwin Schrodinger

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. — Erwin Schrodinger