Schrödinger and Einstein

Schrödinger and Einstein helped invent quantum mechanics. But they didn’t really believe in its implications for the structure of reality, so in their later years they couldn’t get themselves to simply use it like most of their colleagues. Thus, they were largely sidelined. While others made rapid progress in atomic, nuclear and particle physics, they spent a lot of energy criticizing and analyzing quantum theory.

They also spent a lot of time on ‘unified field theories’: theories that...