"A hundred years ago this week, at the height of the quantum revolution, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger submitted a manuscript for publication. Its centerpiece was an innocuous-looking equation that would alter science's entire conception of reality. Even now the Schrodinger equation remains physicists' foremost window into the quantum realm. It tells scientists how that strange world works; that is, how quantum objects interact with their surroundings."
"But in doing so, it sets the mysteries of quantum mechanicsmany of which elude understanding to this dayin stark mathematical relief. A full century after Schrodinger penned his famous equation, scientists and philosophers are still seeking to defineand expandits hazy boundaries. It does a great job describing the quantum systems that physicists study in their labs. But should the physicists themselves really be left out of the equation?"
"As nonsensical as this question may seem, attempts to answer it are already offering new and surprising lessons about the quantum world. Inserting the observer into the Schrodinger equation, it seems, allows transformative new perspectives on century-old questions. We've been trying to do physics as though it's just there, says Anne-Catherine de la Hamette, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. And we forgot to ask, Well, who is actually measuring stuff?'"
Erwin Schrodinger submitted his equation a century ago, creating a central mathematical framework for quantum physics that describes how quantum objects interact with their surroundings. The equation renders quantum enigmas—superposition, wave-like behavior, nonlocal correlations—in stark mathematical relief while capturing laboratory systems effectively. Scientists and philosophers continue to probe and expand the equation's boundaries, questioning whether the formalism should include observers and measurement processes. Efforts to insert the observer into the equation are producing new, surprising lessons and transformative perspectives on longstanding puzzles such as the measurement problem and the role of observers in defining physical reality.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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