Home > Work > Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution
1 " From this", says Schrödinger, "I learned many things, but not religion." His favourite question was, "Sir, do you really believe that? "
― John Gribbin , Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution
2 " At one point, Einstein had commented: ‘It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe. "
3 " According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, when an electron is ejected from an electron ‘gun’ on one side of the experiment it leaves as a particle, and can be detected as a particle. But it immediately dissolves into a probability wave, which travels through both of the holes and interferes with itself to make a pattern of probability on the other side of the holes. At the detector screen, the electron can appear as a particle at any point allowed by the probabilities, but with some places more likely than others, and, crucially, some locations being absolutely forbidden. There is a ‘collapse of the wave function’ at the point where the electron is observed, or measured. It arrives as a particle. "
4 " The existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from the point of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the existence of elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics. The asserted impossibility of a physical or chemical explanation of the function peculiar to life would be . . . analogous to the insufficiency of the mechanical analysis for the understanding of the stability of atoms. "
