For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding figures of quantum mechanics and a Nobel Prize laureate (1933), was an Austrian physicist with a mind that wandered far beyond the boundaries of physics.
Born in Vienna to an academic family, he studied at the University of Vienna and later taught at leading institutions across Europe — from Stuttgart and Breslau (now Wrocław), to Zurich, Berlin, Oxford, Graz, and Ghent. In 1940, he became a professor at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, and later, from 1956, at the University of Vienna.
Schrödinger was deeply drawn to philosophy and the ancient Indian Upanishads, and his personal life reflected an individualistic, nontraditional approach to relationships.
He formulated the famous Schrödinger equation — a mathematical model that describes the wave–particle duality of matter — and proposed the iconic “Schrödinger's cat” thought experiment to illustrate the paradoxes of quantum theory: a cat that is both alive and dead until observed.
His book What Is Life? had a profound impact on the discovery and understanding of DNA, bridging physics and biology in ways that still resonate today.