Years later, Schrödinger, who will nevertheless become one of the most acute thinkers on questions about quanta, recognized his defeat. “There was a moment,” he writes, “when the creators of wave mechanics [that is, himself; who else?] nurtured the illusion of having eliminated the discontinuities in quantum theory. But the discontinuities eliminated from the equations of the theory reappear the moment the theory is confronted with what we observed.”
