Schrödinger, Erwin
From The Encyclopedia of Earth
August 18, 2006, 5:08 pm
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Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), an Austrian physicist known for his mathematical development of wave mechanics (1926), a form of quantum mechanics (see quantum theory) and for his formulation of the wave equation (the Schrödinger equation), the most widely used mathematical tool of modern quantum theory. For this work, he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with P. A. M. Dirac. His book What is Life? (1945) has inspired many subsequent efforts to explain biological evolution, especially the evolution of complex systems, in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concepts of entropy and negative entropy.
