Schrodinger: Difference between revisions

After his visits to London, Cambridge and Oxford, Schrodinger and Anny made their way to Leiden in the Netherlands. There, Paul Ehrenfest, who had taken the Chair of Lorentz, held a lecture series to rival the Kapitsa Club in Cambridge. After a good dinner, Ehrenfest would fire probing questions at the visiting speaker who would be staying in the guest room of his house at 57 Witte Rozenstraat. The speaker would then write their signature on the wall in the hall just outside the guest room. Many of the great theoretical physicists had signed in this way, including Einstein, Planck, Bohr and Dirac. Schrodinger added his signature on 21 March 1928.

 

Being so much in demand for lectures did not enhance Schrodinger's scientific productivity for new publications. He produced few papers of notes during the six years he spent in Berlin. His six-month burst of creativity of 1926 was not to be repeated again. He only published two papers in 1928 with just some reviews and short essays in 1929. It is true his annus mirabilis of 1926 was an almost impossible act to follow, but Schrodinger was reluctant to get into the details of extending his theory of wave mechanics in more practical way achieved by others such as Born, London, Heitler and Pauling. In the very competitive scientific atmosphere of Berlin in the late 1920s, this lack of productivity was getting noticed. For example, Leo Szilard said : "Unfortunately, Schroding is doing too much reading and not writing anything".