2 - Boltzmann's influence on Schrödinger

Summary

Introduction

Having the privilege of writing this paper as a grandson of Boltzmann I apologize for not being a historian of science. A manifestation of Boltzmann's influence on Schrödinger is Schrödinger's enthusiastic quotation of Boltzmann's line of thought: ‘His line of thought may be called my first love in science. No other has ever thus enraptured me or will ever do so again.’ (Schrödinger, 1929; reprinted in Schrödinger, 1957, p. XII.) Even though Schrödinger had no personal contact with Boltzmann, his scientific education at the University of Vienna was in the tradition of Boltzmann. His thesis advisor and director of the second Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna, Franz Serafin Exner, was an ardent admirer of Boltzmann and so was Boltzmann's successor on the chair for theoretical physics, Friedrich Hasenöhrl. Schrödinger paid the most impressive tribute to his teacher Hasenöhrl when he received the Nobel Prize in 1933. He avowed that Hasenöhrl might have stood in his place had he not been killed in the first world war (Schrödinger, 1935, p. 87).

Later one of Schrödinger's main fields of interest was the application of Boltzmann's statistical methods which he called ‘natural statistics’ to various problems. And it was not an accident that a paper in this field ‘On Einstein's Gas Theory’ triggered the idea of wave mechanics (Schrödinger, 1926, 1984).