Schrodinger’s God

Schrodinger’s God

Erwin Schrodinger was Nobel prize winning Austrian physicist who also made significant contributions to theoretical biology. His most famous work in physics was the formulation of the Schrodinger wave equation – a neater and more simple version of Werner Heisenberg’s matrix quantum mechanics. Much like Einstein, Schrodinger spoke of the hand of God being at work in the laws of the universe, and was attracted to the Vedantic mystical philosophy of ancient India, as well as the writings of Christian and Islamic mystics.

Schrodinger was a talented philosophical writer. If he had applied the same intensity to his philosophical expositions that he did to physics, he would likely have been remembered as a Western version of Krishnamurti, and could certainly have made a career as a populariser of Eastern spiritual ideas, in the mode of Alan Watts or Eckhart Tolle. In fact, throughout his life, he held philosophy and religion in a higher regard than physics. This situation was captured by the Irish artist John Synge in his painting “Schrodinger in the Hand of God,” which depicts Erwin studying at his desk, supported in the hand of the divine being.

Above: “Schrodinger in the Hand of God”, by John Synge

Interestingly, at times, both Synge and Schrodinger himself claimed to be atheists – but only in the sense that Eastern religions can be held to be atheistic, or Western mystics can be in their unconventional notions of the divine. There are plenty of incidences in Schrodinger’s books and correspondences in which he refers to an active or creative god, involved with the laws of the universe, which he termed “the good Lord.” In fact, his “atheism” had much more to do with disapproval of and disassociation from certain ways in which religion was practiced, than it did towards a disbelief in God.

Schrodinger completed a doctoral thesis in 1910 on electrical conductivity. Initially taking a job as a research assistant, he worked his way up to professorship at the University of Stuttgart in 1921, where he switched his research to quantum statistics and made his major contributions to physics.

In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel prize for the alternative formulation he provided to Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. He also wrote a highly influential book called What is Life?, which applied physics and chemistry to biology. This book is regarded as one of the contributing causes of the molecular revolution in biology.

Schrodinger identified with socialism and in typical socialist style, was critical of the way that religion had been used to control people by secular governments and military forces. He wrote the following illuminating passage at the beginning of his short philosophical book Seeking for the Road, in 1925. As the passage suggests, Schrodinger was critical equally critical of what he called the “atheism of natural science” as he was of the historical use of religion to manipulate and control:

“Rising to their feet after centuries of shameful servitude imposed by the Church, conscious of their sacred rights and their divine mission, the natural sciences turned against their ancient tormentress  with  blows  of  rage  and  hatred;  heedless  that,  with  all  her inadequacies and derelictions of duty, she was still the one and only appointed guardian of our most sacred ancestral heritage. Slowly, almost unobserved, that spark of ancient Indian wisdom, which the marvellous Rabbi had kindled to new flame beside the Jordan, flickered out; the light faded from the re-born sun of Greece, whose rays had ripened the fruits we now enjoy. The people no longer know anything of these things. Most of them have nothing to hold on to and no one to follow. They believe neither in God nor gods; to them the Church is now only a political party, and morality nothing but a burdensome restriction which, without the support of those no longer credible bugbears on which it leant for so long, is now without any basis whatever. A sort of general atavism has set in; western man is in danger of relapsing to an earlier level of development which he has never properly over-come: crass, unfettered egoism is raising its grinning head, and its fist, drawing irresistible strength from primitive habits, is reaching for the abandoned helm of our ship."

Schrodinger’s religious philosophy often focussed on the unity of consciousness and the material world that is the basis of many forms of Eastern pantheism such as Vedanta, and also finds a place in panentheistic branches of Christianity (such as Eastern Orthodox) and Islam (Sufi, and some branches of Shia). Later in Seek for the Road he gave this striking description of what appear to be his experiences of Vedantic mysticism:

“What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father...thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference—the difference between you and someone else—when objectively what is there is the same?

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’. Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

Yet Schrodinger’s spiritual outlook was not exclusively Eastern and he would quote Western mystics in support of his views, whose experiences he thought were similar. (We have seen in the first passage from Seek for the Road, quoted earlier, that he regarded Jesus of Nazareth with the same respect as the Eastern mystics.) In a 1948 publication in Acta Physica Austriaca he quoted this beautiful passage from the Islamic mystic Aziz Nasafi as an illustration of the unity of consciousness that he felt existed behind the multiplicity of beings:

“The world of spirits is a single spirit standing like a light at the back of the world of bodies and shining through each individual that comes into existence as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, more or less light penetrates through into the world. But the light always remains the same.”

Above: The books What is Life? which helped to bring about the molecular revolution in biology, and My View of the World, which contains the essay Seek for the Road, one of Schrodinger's most detailed explorations of the Vedanta philosophy.

Schrodinger claimed that his scientific work was a route to the godhead. Much like Newton and Einstein, Schrodinger spoke of science as a game to discover rules set by God. Lecture notes believed to have been used at one of the Catholic universities in Belgium contained this revealing passage:

“Science is a game – but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives… If a man cuts a picture carefully into 1000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but has also devised the rules of the game – but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness – or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how many of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how many apparently are caused by your own mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from its limitations.”

In What is Life?, having given an account of the operations of chromosomes based around quantum principles in stead of the statistical laws that were used in biology at the time (which allowed for a convincing explanation of how chromosomes could remain regular despite their small size) he described the chromosome as “the finest masterpiece ever achieved by the Lord’s quantum mechanics.” In a poem written for Kate Nolan, a relief worker for the Red Cross, who became the mother of one of his children, he confided:

“I prayed to God, the ever unknown one,

to him who blossoms from the earth in spring

and bends the boughs in fall with blessed burden

to take away from meal joy and truth,

but then be pleased to give me your dear self,

the only bliss to stay by me forever”

In a 1948 science article he offered an interesting critique of the philosophy of logical positivism, which had dominated the first half of the twentieth century and left a legacy of materialism in science which is felt to the present day. In seeking to banish personal experience from the world altogether, he held that positivists had removed any possibility of direct contact with a personal God or of mystical experiences:

“A personal God cannot be encountered in a world picture that becomes accessible only at the price that everything personal in it is excluded from it. We know that whenever God is experienced, it is an experience exactly as real as a direct sense impression, as real as one’s own personality.”

After his 60th birthday Schrodinger spent less time on physics, and more on philosophy. At the 1946 event of the annual Eranos Tagung conference, founded by Carl Jung, Schrodinger gave a lecture titled “The Spirit of Science.” He began with an exposition of Shankara’s famous commentary of the Vedanta sutra, and concluded that the “spirit” that is revealed by the Vedanta can never be reached through scientific inquiry, and indeed cannot even be investigated by science:

“The spirit, strictly speaking, can never be the object of scientific inquiry, because objective knowledge of the spirit is a contradiction in terms. Yet, on the other hand, all knowledge relates to the spirit, or, more properly, exists in it, and this is the sole reason for our interest in any field of knowledge whatsoever.”

On his death, the priest at the church in the small village of Alpbach where the funeral took place initially objected to his burial in the church grounds as Schrodinger had not been a practicing Catholic, but relented on learning that he had been on good standing with the Pontifical Academy of Science. It is a chain of events which is illuminating of the welcoming attitude of the Catholic Church towards science and (following the Vatican II conference) to those who do not practice the Catholic religion explicitly.

In summary then we find a man much after Einstein’s heart in his vision of science as a quest to find the rules set by the “good Lord”, with a preference for mysticism over organised religion, and a particular interest in the Vedanta.