Wednesday 4 September 2013

Erwin Schrodinger:

“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.

Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.”
― Erwin Schrödinger


In quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation is a partial differential equation that describes how the quantum state of some physical system changes with time. It was formulated in late 1925, and published in 1926, by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger.
 

i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r},t) = \left [ \frac{-\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2 + V(\mathbf{r},t)\right ] \Psi(\mathbf{r},t)


Schrödinger's "paradox"

In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all isolated systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. Since life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state - some argue that this seems to violate the aforementioned Second Law implicating a paradox. However, since life is not an isolated system, there is no paradox. The increase of order inside an organism is more than paid for by an increase in disorder outside this organism. By this mechanism, the Second Law is obeyed, and life maintains a highly ordered state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe. In order to increase the complexity on Earth - as life does - energy is needed. Most of the energy for life here on Earth is provided by the Sun. (Some is provided by natural radioactivity, a form of nuclear energy which is a residue of the energy of the supernovae from which came the dust that formed the planets of the solar system).

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