Suppose you put a cat in a sealed box, and the cat shares the box with a bit of potentially radioactive material (the behavior of which is described by quantum mechanics). Schrödinger, in particular, was not happy with the Copenhagen interpretation, so he proposed a counterexample, in the form of a thought experiment – one of the more famous thought experiments in the history of science. That seemed difficult for many (such as Albert Einstein) to swallow – how can the mere act of observing alter the state of an observed body? The answer – that’s just the way the world is, when viewed at the quantum level – did not please everyone. It is only when you physically observe the electron that the wave equation “collapses” to yield just one position.
The Copenhagen interpretation said that an electron (or whatever is being described by a wave equation) is in all those places at once there is a superposition of electrons at every point predicted by the wave equation. In the 1930s, there arose an interpretation of wave mechanics that came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation, because it came out of Niels Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen, with Bohr as its principal proponent. That was disconcerting (to non-quantum physicists) because it means that you actually do not know – and can never know – exactly what an electron is doing or where it is – you can only make a calculated guess. For this, Schrödinger shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.Īfter Schrödinger, the big question was: what do the wave functions in the wave equation physically mean? Schrödinger’s own view was that the wave function of an electron represents the probability that you will find that electron at a particular place in the atom. This marked the beginning of what is often called wave mechanics, the true flowering of quantum physics. What Schrödinger showed in 1926 was that one could describe a hydrogen atom by an equation, a wave equation, the solutions of which would perfectly predict the energy states of the atom. By the early 1920s, it was suspected not only that waves have particle-like properties, but that particles, such as electrons and protons, have wave-like properties as well. It was known that energy is not continuous, but is passed back and forth in small packets, called quanta, which explained such things as why electrons in an atom could only be found in certain energy states, and why, when electrons moved from state to state, the atom emitted only certain discrete wavelengths of light. When Schrödinger came into physics, quantum theory was about 20 years old. Schrodinger’s equation mathematically determined the regions that an electron was most likely to be found in the orbital lobes.Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist, was born Aug. Schrodinger’s theory made use of electrons as waves, treating them as clouds of negative charge. The electron spin number (ms) -describes the spin of the electron either up or down.The magnetic quantum number (ml) – describes the energy level in the subshell.The principal quantum number (n) - describes the energy of the electron and its distance from the nucleus.