Top 71 Erwin Schrodinger Quotes
#1. THE STRIKING CONTRAST In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation.
Erwin Schrodinger
#2. disorderly experience we should have if our senses were susceptible to the impact of a few molecules only.
Erwin Schrodinger
#3. 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 West.
Erwin Schrodinger
#4. Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine.
Erwin Schrodinger
#5. Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind ...
Erwin Schrodinger
#6. The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details.
Erwin Schrodinger
#7. We have inherited from our forefathers the keen
longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.
Erwin Schrodinger
#8. Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.
Erwin Schrodinger
#9. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.
Erwin Schrodinger
#10. However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring.
Erwin Schrodinger
#12. Plato was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it - against reason - as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience ...
Erwin Schrodinger
#13. It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism' which produces 'order from disorder' and the new one, producing 'order from order'.
Erwin Schrodinger
#14. The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves.
Erwin Schrodinger
#15. Our mind, by virtue of a certain finite, limited capability, is by no means capable of putting a question to Nature that permits a continuous series of answers. The observations, the individual results of measurements, are the answers of Nature to our discontinuous questioning.
Erwin Schrodinger
#16. The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena.
Erwin Schrodinger
#17. No. I do not think that. For the new principle that is involved is a genuinely physical one: it is, in my opinion, nothing else than the principle of quantum theory over again.
Erwin Schrodinger
#18. We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny. If we want it, we must do something about it.
Erwin Schrodinger
#19. It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic;
Erwin Schrodinger
#20. No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.
Erwin Schrodinger
#21. Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help.
Erwin Schrodinger
#22. The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness.
Erwin Schrodinger
#25. Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors.
Erwin Schrodinger
#26. How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what?
Erwin Schrodinger
#27. Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better.
Erwin Schrodinger
#29. I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.
Erwin Schrodinger
#30. Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. ... Nature does not act by purposes.
Erwin Schrodinger
#31. It has been explained in chapter 1 that the laws of physics, as we know them, are statistical laws.2 They have a lot to do with the natural tendency of things to go over into disorder.
Erwin Schrodinger
#32. Entanglement is not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum
mechanics.
Erwin Schrodinger
#33. A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
Erwin Schrodinger
#34. Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
Erwin Schrodinger
#35. The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday.
Erwin Schrodinger
#36. Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life", but not so mind.
Erwin Schrodinger
#37. [A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
Erwin Schrodinger
#38. The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it ...
Erwin Schrodinger
#39. If we are going t stick to this damned quantum-jumping, then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.
Erwin Schrodinger
#40. The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.
Erwin Schrodinger
#41. If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.
Erwin Schrodinger
#43. In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ...
Erwin Schrodinger
#44. If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.
Erwin Schrodinger
#45. The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.
Erwin Schrodinger
#46. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.
Erwin Schrodinger
#47. If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.
Erwin Schrodinger
#51. I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.
Erwin Schrodinger
#53. The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
Erwin Schrodinger
#54. What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
Erwin Schrodinger
#56. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
Erwin Schrodinger
#57. I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.
Erwin Schrodinger
#58. An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.
Erwin Schrodinger
#59. But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow.
Erwin Schrodinger
#60. Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.
Erwin Schrodinger
#61. Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.
Erwin Schrodinger
#62. For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
Erwin Schrodinger
#63. If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian| warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men - and cowards.
Erwin Schrodinger
#64. entropy taken with a negative sign', which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann's original argument turned.
Erwin Schrodinger
#65. In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.
Erwin Schrodinger
#66. The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it
Erwin Schrodinger
#67. proportional to the absolute temperature, in quantitative agreement with theory (Curie's law).
Erwin Schrodinger
#68. All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.
Erwin Schrodinger
#69. Though the single atoms change their orientation incessantly, they produce on the average (owing to their enormous number) a constant small preponderance of orientation in the direction of the field and proportional to it.
Erwin Schrodinger
#70. Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.
Erwin Schrodinger
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