"When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representation, enter into a temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described as before, viz., by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics." (Erwin Schrödinger, 1935) [defining entanglement]
"[A living organism] feeds upon negative entropy […] Thus, the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell", 1944)
"The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"A theoretical science unaware that those of its constructs considered relevant and momentous are destined eventually to be framed in concepts and words that have a grip on the educated community and become part and parcel of the general world picture - a theoretical science, I say, where this is forgotten, and where the initiated continue musing to each other in terms that are, at best, understood by a small group of close fellow travelers, will necessarily be cut off from the rest of cultural mankind; in the long run it is bound to atrophy and ossify however virulently esoteric chat may continue within its joyfully isolated groups of experts." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Are There Quantum Jumps?", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol. 3, 1952)
"As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be ‘true’. A complete satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be precise, we can, of course, think of it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but more so than a ‘winged lion’." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Science and Humanism", 1952)
"'Mathematics' appears to be at the bottom of everything, since we find it unexpectedly where we have not put it in." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"[…] the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities." (Erwin Schrödinger, „Mind and Matter: the Tarner Lectures", 1956)
"While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space." (Erwin Schrödinger, „Mind and Matter: the Tarner Lectures", 1956)
"Primary scientific papers are not meant to be final statement of indisputable truths; each is merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungle of ignorance." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)
"A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries […]." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)" (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"Every process, event, happening - call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy - or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"Hence the awkward expression ‘negative entropy’ can be replaced by a better one: entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then." (Erwin Schrödinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"A theoretical science unaware that those of its constructs considered relevant and momentous are destined eventually to be framed in concepts and words that have a grip on the educated community and become part and parcel of the general world picture - a theoretical science, I say, where this is forgotten, and where the initiated continue musing to each other in terms that are, at best, understood by a small group of close fellow travelers, will necessarily be cut off from the rest of cultural mankind; in the long run it is bound to atrophy and ossify however virulently esoteric chat may continue within its joyfully isolated groups of experts." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Are There Quantum Jumps?", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol. 3, 1952)
"As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experiences can ever be ‘true’. A complete satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be precise, we can, of course, think of it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but more so than a ‘winged lion’." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Science and Humanism", 1952)
"'Mathematics' appears to be at the bottom of everything, since we find it unexpectedly where we have not put it in." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"[…] the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)
"Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities." (Erwin Schrödinger, „Mind and Matter: the Tarner Lectures", 1956)
"While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space." (Erwin Schrödinger, „Mind and Matter: the Tarner Lectures", 1956)
"Primary scientific papers are not meant to be final statement of indisputable truths; each is merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungle of ignorance." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)
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