Augustine Pamplany CST

Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was awarded the Noble Prize in Physics in 1993 for developing the new atomic theory.Schrodinger’s famous wave equations were developed in 1926 while he was working on quantum mechanics.

He was born in Vienna in Austria in 1887. His mother was a Lutheran and his father was a Catholic. Though he was brought up in the Lutheran tradition, he was not atheist in the sense of believing in a personal God. He had a strong inclination and interest in the Eastern forms of religion and is said to have developed a pantheistic frame of mind. He had a very unconventional, personal and family life. He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. This facilitated his burial in the Catholic Cemetery though he was not a Catholic.

He had a deep interest in philosophy and was much influenced by Schopenhauer and Spinoza. He believed in the unity and oneness of reality. He stated: “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 way.”

He did not consider science to be the paramount form of knowledge and held the view that scientific knowledge is far insufficient to comprehend truth. “I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. 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. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.” He did not believe in the aesthetic value of Science: “Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.”

He was much interested in consciousness and denied materialism. He affirmed that “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness in absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” He openly expressed his interest in mysticism too. “I shall not keep free of metaphysics, nor even of mysticism; they play a role… We living beings all belong to one another. We are actually members or aspects of a single Being, which we may in Western terminology call God, while in the Upanishads it is called Brahman.”