Preface
1. Whatever you may have heard, it is not a “paradox.”
Chapter 1 – Winds of Change
1. The mathematical details are a little more subtle than I indicate here, but are covered in my book Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution.
2. Everything happens in reverse, of course, when atoms absorb light, with electrons jumping up the energy levels and making dark lines in the spectrum.
Chapter 2 – Professor Schrödinger
1. To be precise, according to statistical mechanics it is possible for heat to flow from a cooler object to a hotter one, but this is so unlikely that you will never see it happen in everyday life.
2. Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society, 1961, page 223.
3. His diaries are fairly explicit about this aspect of his life.
Chapter 3 – A Quantum Revolution
1. See Physics Today, volume 29, number 12, 1976.
2. Remember the unit of measure.
3. From an interview with Abraham Pais, reported by Pais in his book Inward Bound, Oxford UP, 1986.
4. Bloch.
5. See Moore.
6. Specifically, the normalization of the wave function, if you want to check it out.
7. Allen & Unwin, London, 1971.
8. But be warned “standard” does not necessarily mean “best.”
9. It was Bohr who actually found the derivation of the uncertainty principle from wave mechanics, following Heisenberg’s lead.
10. In the group photograph taken at this meeting, Schrödinger is tucked away in the back, not in the front row, where you might expect him to be. The reason is that he turned up dressed in a casual sports jacket instead of the smart dark suit that was usual in those days. This was not a one-off, as we shall see, but an indication of his attitude to convention.
11. See Six Impossible Things.
12. Quoted by Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.
Chapter 4 – Golden Years
1. See Scott.
2. Just to be clear, nobody can actually do these calculations for a real drop of color; but the rules for how to do such calculations emerge from thermodynamics, in the same way that we have rules describing, for example, how quickly an ice cube melts in a glass of water without being able to calculate the behavior of each individual molecule.
3. See my book Six Impossible Things.
4. There was also a happy ending for London, who did eventually take up Lindemann’s offer and got out of Germany later in 1933.
5. Then equivalent to about $27,000 at 1933 prices, or $500,000 today.
6. He received in reply a form letter, signed by Hitler, accepting the resignation and thanking him for his services.
Chapter 5 – The Legend of Schrödinger’s Cat
1. Rosenfeld’s commentary, along with reprints of the “EPR paper” and an English translation of the Schrödinger’s cat paper, are included in the collection Quantum Theory and Measurement, edited by John Wheeler and Wojciech Zurek.
2. Volume 47, p777.
3. Volume 23, p807, p823, p844. The translation I follow, by John Trimmer, first appeared in the Proceedings of the American Physical Society, volume 124 p323, in 1980.
4. Einstein’s Masterwork, Icon, 2015.
5. This is sometimes called a “paradox,” and so is the Schrödinger’s cat puzzle, but neither is a paradox in the proper meaning of the term.
6. See my book Computing With Quantum Cats.
7. Stored in the archive at Princeton University.
8. Remember, though, that experiments have now proved that the “separation principle” does not hold.
9. Cat lovers should be reassured that nobody has done such an experiment, and nobody plans to. It is purely a “thought experiment”, all in the mind.
10. See Six Impossible Things.
Chapter 6 – Two Narrow Escapes
1. The reference is to a referendum that would be held under Nazi supervision on April 10. Just over 99 percent of the votes counted were in favor of a union with Germany—Anschluss.
2. I knew Sir William McCrea, as he became, much later when he was the head of the astronomy group at the University of Sussex.
3. Fermi himself left Italy for the USA later in 1938 and played a key role in the development of the atomic bomb.
4. I should mention that the Doppler effect does not cause this cosmological redshift. See https://johngribbinscience.wordpress...
