Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who wrote down, in 1926, the wave equation that governs quantum mechanics, and who then spent the rest of his life uneasy with what it implied, inventing the cat in the box to show the absurdity. He left Germany when Hitler came to power, and Austria after the Anschluss, and spent seventeen years in Dublin at the institute de Valera founded for him. What Is Life?, from lectures there in 1943, asked how physics could account for the stability of heredity and proposed an aperiodic crystal carrying a code, which Crick and Watson read and set out to find. He won the Nobel Prize in 1933.