Schrödinger and Einstein
Schrödinger had proposed the equation that now bears his name and holds a similar position to Newton’s (1643-1727) second law of motion in classical mechanics, which of course, gives rise to a second-order ordinary differential equation (homogeneous and non-homogeneous), analogously Schrodinger’s equation is time dependent and can be derived by considering the Hamiltonian of Ireland’s finest man of Science Sir Rowan William Hamilton (1805-1865) who at one stage in his life was besotted with W. Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) sister and bombarded her with sonnets and poems, however on viewing them Wordsworth advised Hamilton to give up his attempt at poetry and to concentrate on Mathematical Physics which fortunately for the world he did. Schrödinger and Einstein had a friendly correspondence about Schrödinger’s equation, which Einstein praised as “an improvement over my own methods.” Their work in quantum mechanics continues to influence modern physics.
Alternative Formulations of Physics
Erwin’s approach is not the only way to represent this pillar of 20th-century Physics there is the matrix formulation of Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976, of the Uncertainty fame) and the path integral formulation of my “old friend” Richard Feynman (1918-1988) which he presented in his QED for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 with Shin’ichirō Tomonaga (1906-1979) and Julian Seymour Schwinger (1918-1994) who derived independently QED from Richard and also independent of each other. Staying with Richard for a moment, I recall reading his book Feynman’s Lost Lecture) in three days (as I could not put it down) when he retraced Isaac Newton’s footsteps in deriving the monumental inverse square law of gravity by using only the theorems that were at Isaac’s disposal, namely Kepler’s (1571-1630) laws of planetary motion and the properties of the ellipse that he would have obtained from the Greek’s of antiquity.
Returning to Erwin, he was the successor of Max Planck (1858-1947), which must have been an awesome feeling filling the shoes of one of the creators of Quantum Physics along with A. Einstein and N. Bohr (1885-1962), all of whom were Nobel Prize winners.
Unifying the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature
It might have come as a bit of a shock to Albert receiving this letter (I am not sufficiently knowledgeable regarding this dialogue to know for sure) as Albert spent the final years of his life in Physics ostracized from the Physics community for not accepting the probabilistic view of the universe that was being proposed by the “old guard” of Quantum Physics (already mentioned) as well as the emerging “new kids on the block” : W. Heisenberg, W. Pauli (1900-1958), L. de Broglie (1892-1987) and P.A.M Dirac (1902-1984). During his self-imposed exile, Albert worked on his unified field theory, attempting to combine into a single law the four fundamental forces of nature, namely the electromagnetic force, the gravitational force, the strong nuclear force and the weak force, respectively.
Once again, I have run out of space, until next time I can write about you “old friends”.
