Erwin Schrödinger Trivia
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49 free Erwin Schrödinger trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Erwin Schrödinger trivia quiz covers the Austrian physicist behind the most famous equation in quantum mechanics and the most famous cat in science. The easy questions cover the Nobel Prize he shared with Dirac, the cat, the word 'entanglement', Vienna and the book that pointed Watson and Crick at the gene. From there it moves through the life: the botanist father, the artillery service, the Berlin chair he inherited from Planck, the Oxford fellowship that fell apart over his living arrangements, and the Irish prime minister who offered him a home. The harder end covers the sanatorium where the equation was born, the paper title with 'eigenvalue' in it, the professor who dismissed him for 'political unreliability', the chair he accepted in India, the Dublin suburb, the Celtic theory, the affine field theory Einstein called 'preliminary', the Upanishads, the far-side crater and the schilling note. Every answer was checked against Schrödinger's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Schrödinger shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with which British physicist?
Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac had recast quantum theory to obey relativity, and his equation predicted antimatter before anyone had seen it: the positron turned up in a cloud chamber in 1932, a year before the prize.
Q 02Schrödinger's 1933 Nobel Prize citation praised the discovery of 'new productive forms of' what?
Atomic theory
Atomic theory was the committee's phrase for wave mechanics: one equation now yielded an atom's energy levels, where the older orbit model had to impose them by rule.
Q 03Which now-ubiquitous term did Schrödinger coin in 1935?
Quantum entanglement
Quantum entanglement, his English for the German Verschränkung, struck him as 'the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics'; the link between distant particles now drives quantum computing and cryptography.
Q 04Which Greek letter stands for the wave function in the Schrödinger equation?
Psi
Psi is the wave function; Schrödinger took it for a real physical wave, but physicists came to read its square as only the odds of finding a particle, an interpretation he never accepted.
Q 05Whose 1924 idea that matter behaves as waves inspired Schrödinger's equation?
Louis de Broglie
Louis de Broglie proposed matter waves in his doctoral thesis; Schrödinger read it late in 1925, gave a seminar on it, and within weeks had found a wave equation to match.
Q 06Schrödinger spoke English from childhood because his mother's mother came from where?
Britain
Britain was his grandmother's home: her family came from Leamington Spa, and with a bilingual mother he heard English in the house alongside German and picked up the two languages almost together.
Q 07In Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, the cat's fate depends on whether what happens?
A radioactive atom decays
A radioactive atom decays, or doesn't, within the hour; if it does, a Geiger counter trips a hammer that smashes a flask of poison, so the theory seemed to leave the cat both dead and alive.
Q 08Whose theoretical physics lectures had the greatest influence on the student Schrödinger?
Friedrich Hasenohrl
Friedrich Hasenohrl had just succeeded Boltzmann, and his 1907 inaugural lecture on the older man's ideas impressed the student so deeply that it shaped his thinking for life.
Q 09During the First World War Schrödinger served as a commissioned officer in what?
The fortress artillery
The fortress artillery sent him to the Isonzo front, where he was cited for commanding a battery in battle and still managed to post physics papers to the journals from his position.
Q 10In 1921 Schrödinger moved to which Swiss university, where he stayed until 1927?
Zurich
Zurich ended a run of three job moves in eighteen months; he stayed six years and, in one six-month burst in 1926, wrote the papers that founded wave mechanics.
Q 11Whom did Schrödinger succeed at the University of Berlin in 1927?
Max Planck
Max Planck, the man who had launched quantum theory, was retiring; Schrödinger kept the chair only until 1933, when he walked out of Germany rather than live under the persecution of Jews.
Q 12After leaving Germany in 1933, Schrödinger became a Fellow of which Oxford college, then home to CS Lewis?
Magdalen
Magdalen had only just admitted him, in November 1933, when word came that he had won the Nobel Prize; he never settled there, and went home to Austria after three years.
Q 13Besides his wife Anny, who shared Schrödinger's household in wartime Ireland?
His mistress and their daughter
Q 21The famous 1927 group photograph of Schrödinger, Marie Curie and fellow quantum pioneers was taken at which conference?
The Solvay Conference
The Solvay Conference brought 29 physicists to Brussels in October 1927 to thrash out the brand-new quantum theory; 17 of them, Schrödinger included, were past or future Nobel winners.
Q 22Schrödinger first tested his wave equation by correctly predicting the energy levels of which atom?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen, with its single electron, was the proving ground: over the Christmas holidays of 1925 he found that his new equation gave its spectrum, and the paper followed within weeks.
Q 23In Schrödinger's own 1935 description, which poison threatens the cat?
Hydrocyanic acid
His mistress and their daughter came too: Hilde March was married to his colleague Arthur March, yet she, Anny and young Ruth all lived with him under one roof.
Q 14After visa delays killed an Edinburgh post in 1936, Schrödinger took a chair at which Austrian university?
Graz
Graz brought him home to Austria from his fellowship at Oxford; two years later German troops marched in and he lost the post.
Q 15Physicists call the Schrödinger equation the quantum counterpart of which classical law?
Newton's second law
Newton's second law turns the forces on a ball or a planet into a definite path; Schrödinger's equation does that job for the wave function, but all it yields is the probability of where a particle will be.
Q 16Schrödinger proposed his famous cat thought experiment in 1935 after extensive correspondence with whom?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein had sent him a rival image that August, a charge of gunpowder left in a blend of exploded and not-yet-exploded states; Schrödinger answered with a cat.
Q 17On what grounds was Schrödinger dismissed from his Austrian chair in 1938?
'Political unreliability'
'Political unreliability' was the verdict even though he had published a letter praising the new regime, a climbdown he regretted for the rest of his life.
Q 18Forbidden to leave Austria in 1938, Schrödinger and his wife fled first to which country?
Italy
Italy was the escape route: newly sacked, he and his wife slipped away to Rome, then travelled on to Oxford and a visiting post in Belgium.
Q 19Which Irish leader personally invited Schrödinger to settle in his country in 1939?
Eamon de Valera
Eamon de Valera had been a mathematician before turning to politics and wanted world-class science for Ireland, so he built the job around the stranded Nobel laureate.
Q 20In Ireland, Schrödinger directed the School of Theoretical Physics at which newly established body?
The Institute for Advanced Studies
He held the post from 1940 until his retirement in 1955.
Hydrocyanic acid, the acid behind cyanide, waits in a small flask beneath a hammer; Schrödinger added drily that the device 'must be secured against direct interference by the cat'.
Q 24What was the title of Schrödinger's influential 1944 book on genetics from a physicist's viewpoint?
What Is Life?
What Is Life? grew out of public lectures and argued that heredity must rest on a molecular code, an idea that drew a generation of physicists into biology.
Q 25Which two scientists credited Schrödinger's 1944 book with turning them toward the gene?
Watson and Crick
Watson and Crick both said so: Watson wrote that it set him on the hunt for the gene, and in 1953 Crick sent Schrödinger a letter saying how much the book had influenced the pair.
Q 26Schrödinger's 1944 book introduced which thermodynamic concept, meaning order fed on by living things?
Negentropy
Negentropy began as his phrase 'negative entropy': a living thing stays ordered, he argued, by drawing order from its food and shedding disorder, and a French physicist later shortened the name.
Q 27Years before DNA's structure was found, Schrödinger proposed that genes are stored in what?
An aperiodic crystal
An aperiodic crystal was his name for a stable molecule whose non-repeating pattern of atoms could hold hereditary information; he pictured a protein, but DNA turned out to be just such a structure.
Q 28Which disease killed Schrödinger in January 1961?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis killed him less than five years after he came home to a chair created for him in Vienna; a grave illness struck about a year after his return and he never fully recovered.
Q 29Schrödinger is buried in which Tyrolean village, host of a yearly European Forum he regularly attended?
Alpbach
Alpbach was the village he loved and chose: he spent much of his last years there and was buried there as he wished, under a cross that carries his own equation.
Q 30The Edinburgh chair Schrödinger missed in 1936 went instead to which fellow quantum pioneer?
Max Born
Max Born, who had lost his own post at Göttingen in 1933, took the chair that October and kept it into the 1950s; Schrödinger went home to Austria instead and was sacked within two years.