Chapter One

Nineteenth-Century Boy

Erwin Schrödinger was the only child of a wealthy Viennese family in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This upbringing naturally affected the kind of person he grew up to be; it also affected the way he thought about science and influenced the development of his greatest scientific idea, for which he received the Nobel Prize.

Antecedents

Erwin was the son of Rudolf and Georgine (Georgie) Schrödinger, who married in 1886. Rudolf’s parents were profoundly affected by the almost casual way in which death could strike even in the most affluent parts of the civilized world in the nineteenth century. At the time of her marriage in 1853 his mother, Maria, was a nineteen-year-old orphan. Just five years later, she died following the birth of a stillborn baby. She had already produced a son, Erwin, who died as a child, a daughter, Marie, and another son, Rudolf, born on 27 January 1857. Her husband, Josef, whose family came originally from Bavaria but had lived in Vienna for several generations, brought up the surviving children on his own, without (as would have been more usual at the time) remarrying. But although the children may have lacked a mother, their material needs were well catered for. Josef owned a modest but profitable business, a factory manufacturing linoleum and oilcloth; this family business would in due course be passed on to his surviving son, Erwin’s father, Rudolf.

Socially, Georgie’s family were a cut above the Schrödingers; indeed, they had aristocratic pretensions. They were descended from a minor nobleman, Anton Wittmann-Denglass, who had been born into a Catholic family in 1771. Such were the religious strictures of the time that when his daughter Josepha fell in love with a Protestant, she was forced to abandon her love-match and marry the family doctor, a good Catholic. She had three children before, perhaps to her relief, she was widowed and able to marry again. This time she chose—or had chosen for her—Alexander Bauer, the manager of her father’s estates. The eldest son of this second marriage, another Alexander Bauer, was born in 1836. He would become Erwin Schrödinger’s maternal grandfather. Alexander Bauer was the first in the family to show an interest in science, studying mathematics and chemistry in Vienna and Paris, and moving on to become a research chemist.

Erwin’s maternal grandmother, Emily, was English and also came from a family with upper-class connections. They claimed descent from the Norman Forestière family, although the name had long since been anglicized to Forster, and had been associated with Bamburgh Castle in north-east England. Thomas Forster, born in 1772, was the son of the governor of Portsmouth, and his eldest daughter, Ann, born in 1816 and one of five children, would become Erwin’s great-grandmother. He had met her when visiting England as a child. Ann married a solicitor, William Russell, and they had three children—William, Emily, and Ann (known as Fanny).

The younger William Russell became an analytical chemist. In 1859–60, while studying chemistry in Paris, he met fellow student Alexander Bauer. The two became friends, and when Emily (nicknamed Minnie) and her mother visited William in France, Alex met Minnie, then just nineteen years old, and the couple fell in love. Once Alexander had completed his studies and obtained his first (very junior) academic post, they were able to marry. After their wedding in Leamington Spa, on 21 December 1862, they lived in Vienna, where their first daughter, Rhoda, was born in 1864, followed by Georgie in 1867; soon after the birth of a third daughter, another Emily/Minnie, in 1874, Emily died of pneumonia.

Alexander Bauer’s career continued to flourish until 1866, when he lost an eye in an explosion at the laboratory. From then on he concentrated on teaching, his studies in the history of chemistry, and the inevitable administrative duties associated with his rise to become Professor of General Chemistry at the Vienna Polytechnic (later the Technical University of Vienna), a post he held until his retirement in 1904. He was also a curator of the Museum of Art and Industry and a member of the Theatre Commission for Lower Austria, and took pleasure in introducing his grandson Erwin to the theatrical arts at an early age.

Alexander was devoted to his daughters, all of whom married men they had met through their father’s connections. Rhoda, the eldest, married the Director of the Viennese Pharmaceutical Commission, Hans Arzberger, but had no children. Minnie, the youngest, married Max Bamberger, who later succeeded Alexander as Professor of General Chemistry, and had a daughter, Helga. Georgie married Rudolf Schrödinger.

Rudolf was a frustrated scientist who had studied under Alexander Bauer at the Technical University, but was obliged to take over the family business rather than pursue a career in chemistry. He married Georgie on 16 August 1886, when he was twenty-nine and she was nineteen. Although Rudolf, like most Austrians, was at least nominally a Catholic, the wedding took place at a Lutheran church (Georgie and her sisters had been brought up in the Lutheran tradition, the nearest thing in Austria to the Anglican religion of their mother), making their son Erwin nominally a Protestant, although as we shall see this meant little in practice. The family was essentially irreligious, attending church only for weddings and funerals. Indeed, when Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, named after his father’s dead brother, his father, and his two grandfathers, was born in Vienna on 12 August 1887 and baptized five days later, even the naming ceremony took place at the Schrödingers’ home, not in church.

Early years

Although Erwin’s English grandmother had died thirteen years before he was born, her influence on the Schrödinger family was strong. His aunt Rhoda had grown up hearing only English spoken at home, and had spent years with her own grandparents in Leamington Spa. His mother’s younger sister, Minnie, who was similarly fluent in English, was only fourteen years older than Erwin, and played with him as a child. So Erwin grew up hearing both English and German spoken at home; according to some accounts, he spoke good English before he learned to speak “proper” German.

Erwin was an only child with two doting aunts, a female first cousin (Dora, the daughter of his father’s sister), and a succession of nurses and maids attending almost to his every whim. It is tempting to see here the origin of patterns in Erwin’s adult relationships with women. He grew up to expect women to dance attendance on him, while being somewhat insensitive to their needs. According to the psychiatrist Dennis Friedman, a boy brought up with both his mother and a nanny to look after him is predisposed to become a philanderer in later life: the experience

creates a division in his mind between the woman he knows to be his natural mother and the woman with whom he has a real hands-on relationship: the woman who bathes him and takes him to the park and with whom he feels completely at one . . . he grows up with the idea that although he will one day go through all the social and sexual formalities of marriage, he will have at the back of his mind the notion of this other woman, who not only knows, but caters for, all his needs.1

Although this suggestion has been challenged (for example, by child psychologist Linda Blair), Friedman could have used Schrödinger as a case study in support of his hypothesis. But any such consequences lay far in the future when the boy Erwin was growing up in Vienna.

At the time Erwin was born, his grandfather Alexander owned a new town house in the centre of Vienna. The five-storey building was divided into five separate apartments, and in 1890 “our” Schrödinger and his parents moved in to the spacious fifth-floor accommodation, with views overlooking St. Stephan’s Cathedral.

Most of what we know about Erwin’s early life comes from the recollections of his aunt Minnie, which should be taken with the same pinch of proverbial salt as similar recollections made (much later in life) by relatives of Albert Einstein about his precocious childhood. But in both cases the reminiscences surely contain seeds of truth. From an early age, Erwin was interested in astronomy: he would persuade Minnie to stand representing the Earth while he ran round her to be the Moon, and then make her walk in a circle around a light representing the Sun while he continued to run round her. He also kept a kind of daily diary even before he could write, dictating his insights to Minnie. A surviving entry from 1891 reads: “In the evening Aunt Emmy [Minnie] cooked a good supper and then we spoke all about the world.” Recording his thoughts and activities on paper was to become a lifetime habit.2

Erwin did not have to leave his cosy family circle even to go to school until he was ten, since up to that time he was tutored privately at home for two mornings a week. According to Minnie, he began to read almost as soon as he could talk, thanks to a maid who explained the names on street signs to him; but apart from such basics, the purpose of his early tuition was to prepare him for the entrance examination for the Gymnasium (equivalent to an English grammar school), where his real education would begin. But while the Schrödingers enjoyed the stereotypical life of the upper middle classes in Vienna, the empire around them was showing signs of the strains that would...