Schrödinger himself got by on the miserable salary he earned from giving occasional classes at the University of Vienna. The rest of the time he had nothing to do. He devoured the writings of Schopenhauer, through whom he came to know the philosophy of Vedanta, and he learned that the horrified eyes of the mutilated horse in the square were also the eyes of the policeman mourning its death; that the teeth that bit into the raw meat were the same that had champed at the grass in the hillside pastures, and that when the women had torn the immense heart from the animal’s chest with their hands, it was their own blood that slathered their faces, because every individual manifestation is only a reflection of Brahman, the absolute reality that underlies the phenomena of the world.
In 1920, he married Annemarie Bertel, but the abundant happiness of the lovers’ early days failed to survive the reality of marriage. Schrödinger could not find decent work, and his wife earned more in one month as a secretary than he did in a year as a professor. He made her resign, and became an itinerant physicist, travelling from one poorly paid post to the next with his wife in tow: they went from Jena to Stuttgart, from Stuttgart to Breslau, and from there on to Switzerland. His luck seemed to change when he was named head of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich, but after one semester he had to stop teaching following a violent attack of bronchitis, later revealed to be the first signs of tuberculosis. He was forced to spend nine months in the clear air of the mountains, interned with his wife in the sanatorium of Doctor Otto Herwig in Arosa in the Swiss Alps. He would return in later years whenever his pulmonary health declined. That first time, Schrödinger weathered the high-altitude cure in the shadows of the Weisshorn and made an almost complete recovery, except for a strange after-effect none of the doctors could explain: he developed a hypersensitivity to sound bordering on the supernatural.
In 1923, Schrödinger was thirty-seven years old, and had at last established a comfortable routine in Switzerland. He and Anny took numerous lovers, but each tolerated the other’s infidelities, and they lived together in peace. His only torment was the knowledge that he had wasted his talents. His intellectual superiority had been evident since childhood: at school, he had always had the highest mark in every subject. His schoolmates were used to Erwin knowing absolutely everything, so that decades later one of them would still remember the only question a teacher had ever posed to which young Schrödinger had not known the answer: what is the capital of Montenegro? His reputation as a genius followed him to the University of Vienna, where his undergraduate colleagues referred to him as The Schrödinger. His hunger for knowledge extended to all areas of science, including biology and botany; moreover, he was obsessed with painting, theatre, music, philology and the study of Classics. His teachers predicted a glorious future for him, on account of his irrepressible curiosity and his evident talent in the exact sciences, but several years after graduating, The Schrödinger found himself nothing more than a run-of-the-mill physicist. None of his articles had made a significant contribution to the field. He had no siblings, nor could he have children with Anny, and if he died, his family name would be lost forever. His biological and intellectual sterility made him consider divorce: perhaps he should give up everything, perhaps he should stop drinking and chasing after every woman he met, or leave physics behind and pursue another of his passions. Perhaps, perhaps. He spent the best part of a year thinking about it, but the result was nothing but increasingly violent arguments with his wife, aggravated by her intense affair with the Dutch physicist Peter Debye, one of Schrödinger’s colleagues from the University of Zurich. With nothing to look forward to but a grey, repetitive future, Schrödinger fell into the same apathy that had ravaged him during the war.
In this state, he received an invitation from his dean to present a seminar on the ideas of de Broglie. He accepted the task with an enthusiasm he had not known since his student days. He analysed the Frenchman’s work front and back, and recognized immediately, just as Einstein had, the potential in the prince’s thesis. At last, Schrödinger had found something to sink his teeth into, and he preened himself during his presentation before the assembled physics department as if he were presenting his own ideas. He explained that quantum mechanics, which was causing such an uproar, could be brought under the purview of a classical schema. There was no need to change the groundwork of the discipline to probe matters at quantum level—no need of one physics for large things and another for small. “And spare us any resort to the repulsive algebra of that accursed Wunderkind, Werner Heisenberg!” Schrödinger said to them, provoking a fit of laughter among his colleagues. If de Broglie was right, all atomic phenomena shared one attribute, and might even—Schrödinger postulated—be nothing more than individual manifestations of an eternal substrate. He was about to finish his remarks when Debye cut him off. That manner, he said, of conceiving of waves was rather childish. It was one thing to say that matter consisted of waves and another, very different one to explain how they undulated. If Herr Schrödinger wished to speak with a modicum of rigour, he would need a wave equation. Without it, de Broglie’s theory was like the French monarchy itself, as charming as it was useless.
Schrödinger returned home with his tail between his legs. Debye may have been right, but his comment was crude, pedantic and malicious. He had always detested that goddamned Dutchman. It was enough seeing how he looked at Anny. Not to mention how she looked at him … “Son of a bitch!” he screamed, shut up in his studio. Leck mich am Arsch! Friss Scheiße und krepier! He kicked over his furniture and threw his books against the wall until a coughing fit brought him to his knees. He fell over panting, his face inches from the wooden floor, his handkerchief stuffed in his mouth as he heaved and retched. When he took it out, he saw a large bloodstain, like a rose with opened petals, an unequivocal sign that his tuberculosis had returned.
Schrödinger arrived at the sanatorium at Villa Herwig shortly before Christmas, and swore he would not return to Zurich without an equation to shove in Debye’s face.
He moved into the same room he always took, next to the daughter of the director, Doctor Herwig, who had divided the sanatorium into one wing for critical patients and another for cases like Schrödinger’s. The doctor had raised his adolescent daughter on his own after his wife died from complications while giving birth. The girl had suffered from tuberculosis since the age of four, and her father blamed himself for her misfortune: she had grown up crawling between the legs of the diseased. The girl had seen hundreds of people die, affected by the same illness as her own, and perhaps it was for this reason that she radiated a supernatural calm, a diaphanous, other-worldly air only broken in those moments when the bacteria awakened in her lungs. Then she would walk through the halls of the centre, her dress spotty with blood, her collarbones stark against her slight shoulders as if about to tear through the skin, like the velvet antlers of a deer during their summer growth.
The first time Schrödinger saw her, the girl had been only twelve years old, but, even then, he had found her stunning. In this, he was no different from the rest of the patients, who were enchanted by this strange creature and seemed to coordinate their cycles of illness and remission with those of little Miss Herwig. For her father, this was one of the oddest phenomena he had encountered in the course of his career, and he sought comparisons for it in the animal kingdom, from the synchronized flight of starlings to the orgiastic outbursts of cicadas and the sudden metamorphosis of locusts—solitary, gentle insects whose proportions and character are deformed until they constitute an insatiable plague, capable of devastating an entire region before dying en masse, fertilizing the ecosystem with such an excess of nutrients that the doves, crows, ducks, ravens and magpies devour them until they are no longer capable of taking flight. If his daughter was healthy, the doctor could rest assured that he would lose not a single one of his patients; if she was ill, he knew he would soon have empty beds. The girl herself had been close to dying more than once. Her condition could transform
her over the course of a single night: she lost so much weight that she seemed to have shrunk to half her size, her blonde hair turned thin like that of a newborn, and her skin, which was normally as pale as a cadaver’s, became practically transparent. That coming and going between the worlds of living and dead had deprived the girl of the pleasures of childhood, but endowed her with a wisdom far greater than her years. Lying in bed for months, she had read not only all the scientific volumes in her father’s library, but also the books left behind by patients who had been discharged, and others she received as gifts from the chronic cases. Her eclectic reading and constant isolation had produced an unusually alert mind and an insatiable curiosity; during Schrödinger’s previous visit, she had assailed him with questions about the most recent advances in theoretical physics, about which she seemed to be thoroughly informed, despite having had virtually no contact with the outside world and never having ventured beyond the region surrounding the sanatorium. At just sixteen years old, Herwig had the mind, the bearing and the presence of someone much older. Schrödinger was quite the opposite.
Now close to forty, he retained his youthful appearance and his adolescent attitude. Unlike his colleagues, he cultivated an informal demeanour, and typically dressed more like a student than a professor. This caused him more than a few problems: once, the concierge of a Zurich hotel refused to admit him to the room booked in his name, convinced he was a vagabond; another time, security guards tried to deny him entry to a prestigious scientific conference to which he had been invited after seeing him arrive with dust in his hair and a crust of mud on his shoes from crossing the mountain on foot instead of taking the train like a respectable citizen. Doctor Herwig knew perfectly Schrödinger’s unconventional character, how he often brought his lovers into the sanatorium, and yet (or perhaps for that very reason) he respected him enormously, and, whenever Schrödinger’s health allowed it, they would ski for hours at a time or climb the nearby mountains together. The physicist’s stay this time had coincided with the doctor’s desire that his daughter finally develop a social life of her own, to which end he had registered her at the most prestigious girls’ school in Davos—but she had failed the mathematics section of the entrance examination. As soon as Schrödinger set foot in the clinic, the doctor took him aside, asking him if he might devote a few hours to tutoring his daughter, if, of course, his health and his professional obligations allowed. Schrödinger refused in the most cordial way possible, then ran upstairs, taking the steps two by two, driven by something that had begun to take shape in his imagination the minute he breathed in the rarefied alpine air, a spell that he knew any distraction, however slight, could vanquish.
He entered his room and sat at the desk without removing his coat or hat. He opened his notebook and began to sketch out his ideas, first slowly and without organization, then at a manic speed, with greater and greater concentration, until everything around him seemed to disappear. He worked for hours, not getting up from his chair, with a tingle running down his spine, and only when the sun had emerged over the horizon and he was too tired to see the paper before him did he drag himself off to bed, falling asleep with his shoes on.
When he awoke, he did not know where he was. His lips were cracked and there was a buzzing in his ears. His head throbbed as though from a hangover after a long night of drinking. He opened the window to let the cool air refresh him, then settled down at his desk, anxious to review the fruit of his epiphany. When he glanced at his notes, his stomach turned. What was this nonsense? He read them from front to back, then from back to front, but nothing written there made sense to him. He failed to understand his own reasoning, how one step led to the next. On the last page, he found the draft of an equation similar to the one he had been looking for, but it bore no apparent relation to the pages that had come before. It was as if someone had entered his room while he slept and had left these calculations there, an unsolvable riddle, just to torture him. What had felt, the night before, like the most significant intellectual transport of his life now seemed little more than the frenzy of an amateur physicist, a sorry episode of megalomania. He rubbed his temples to try and calm his nerves and distance himself from the image in his mind of Debye and Anny laughing at him, but, still, he remained forlorn. He threw his notebook against the wall so hard that the pages tore away from the spine and flew across the room. Disgusted with himself, he changed his clothes, walked with a crestfallen expression to the canteen, and sat in the first empty chair he found.
When he called over the waiter to ask for a coffee, he realized he had arrived during the mealtime of the chronically ill.
Looking at the old woman sitting in front of him, he noticed first her long fingers, sculpted by centuries of wealth and privilege, holding a cup of tea in front of a face whose lower half had been eaten away by the tuberculosis bacterium. Schrödinger tried to conceal his disgust, but was unable to take his eyes off her, gripped by the fear that those deformities, which affected a small proportion of the ill, causing their lymph nodes to swell like clusters of grapes, might one day lay waste to his own features. His unease before the woman affected the entire table; in a matter of seconds, half his fellow diners—men and women as grotesquely disfigured as her—were staring at the physicist as if he were a dog shitting in the aisle of a church. Schrödinger tried to leave, but he felt the graze of a hand on his thigh beneath the white tablecloth. Not an erotic caress, but something akin to an electric shock, it immediately restored his composure. He turned to the owner of the hand, its fingers still resting on his knee like a butterfly with folded wings, and saw Doctor Herwig’s daughter. Schrödinger did not dare smile for fear of frightening her; after thanking her with his eyes for the gesture, he drank his coffee intently, trying not to move a muscle, while his newfound calm spread from one table to the next, as though the girl had touched not him but everyone at the same time. When nothing was audible but the soft clinking of plates and silverware, Miss Herwig pulled away her hand. She stood up, smoothed out the folds of her dress, and turned to the door, stopping only to greet two boys, twins, who grabbed her around the neck and would not let go until she had given each a kiss. Schrödinger asked for a second cup of coffee, but could not bring himself to taste it. He remained seated there until everyone had left the room, then walked to reception, asked for a pencil and paper, and left a note for Doctor Herwig declaring his willingness, indeed his eagerness, to help the man’s daughter.
To prevent any interruption to Schrödinger’s work schedule, Doctor Herwig proposed that the lessons take place in the girl’s room, which connected with that of the physicist through a communicating door. The day of the first class, Schrödinger spent the entire morning getting himself ready. He bathed, shaved carefully, felt compelled at first to leave his hair untouched, but then combed it, thinking he should offer a more formal image, not least because, as he well knew, women often admired his high, clear forehead. He enjoyed a light lunch, and at four in the afternoon heard the clicking of the lock on the other side of the door, followed by two barely audible knocks on the wood, which gave him the beginnings of an erection, so that he had to sit down and wait a few moments before entering Miss Herwig’s room.
The scent of wood filled Schrödinger’s nostrils as soon as he passed through the door, but the oak panelling of the walls was hardly visible beneath the hundreds of beetles, dragonflies, butterflies, crickets, spiders, cockroaches and fireflies pierced with needles or posed inside tiny glass domes with miniature replicas of their natural habitats. In the middle of this immense insectarium, Miss Herwig awaited him, hunched over her desk, looking at him as though he were a new specimen for her collection. In the young woman’s imposing presence, Schrödinger felt, for a fraction of a second, like a timid schoolboy before a teacher impatient at his tardiness, and he offered her an extravagant bow at which she could not help but smile. The physicist noticed her small teeth and the slight gap between her incisors, and only then did he see her as she really was: littl
e more than a girl. Ashamed at the fantasies he had incubated from the time of their meeting in the canteen, Schrödinger took a chair, and they set immediately to studying the problems from the entrance examination. The girl’s mind was agile, and Schrödinger was surprised how much he enjoyed her company, even as his lust for her seemed to have vanished. They worked for two hours, almost entirely in silence, and when she had finished the last of the exercises, they set an hour for the following day, and the girl offered him a cup of tea. Schrödinger drank while the girl showed him the insects her father had collected, which she herself mounted and preserved. When she suggested she should not waste any more of his time, Schrödinger saw that night had fallen. He took his leave from the doorway with the same genuflection as on arrival, and, despite Miss Herwig’s smile, no different from before, Schrödinger returned to his room feeling utterly ridiculous.
When We Cease to Understand the World Page 10