Einstein, Schrödinger, and the story you never heard
How “faith” in the Universe destroyed two brilliant men of genius.
“I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” -Schrödinger
The idea that if only we’re smart and clever enough, we can predict how the Universe will unfold, goes back long, long before humanity even had an inkling as to what the enterprise of science would come to be. Prophets, augurs, soothsayers and diviners were seen to hold a truly mystic power, as the very prospect of knowing the future was as elusive but as tantalizing as the magic thought to be inside a philosopher’s stone.
But after generations of failure, something incredible happened. Building on the old astronomical works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Apollonius of Perga and Ptolemy, scientists of the 16th and 17th century began to not only to uncover predictive descriptions of how the lights in the skies above would move over time, but of the mechanism behind it. Culminating in 1687 with Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and the publication of his Principia, we had moved into a new, scientific era of prediction.
