Lost Schrödinger manuscript shows he built a deterministic quantum model

[TheGreatMoney]

A previously unknown manuscript by Erwin Schrodinger has been found in an Austrian archive, more than 80 years after he wrote it. ScienceAlert's Michelle Starr reports that historian of physics Flavio Del Santo of the University of Geneva discovered the three page document

Schrodinger wrote it after November 1944, under the title Collapse of Determinism. It was a response to an argument by mathematician Edmund Whittaker, who claimed in 1943 that quantum randomness ruled out hidden variables, the idea that some deeper deterministic layer might explain quantum outcomes

Schrodinger pointed out that a hidden variable could take any value continuously between 0 and 1. He then built a simple deterministic model that reproduces quantum probabilities, showing that Whittaker's argument did not hold

The paper was never published, possibly because Heinrich Pelzer published a similar model in 1944. Del Santo's preprint argues that these models were proofs that something was possible, not an endorsement of determinism. Schrodinger himself remained an indeterminist, believing that nature is fundamentally random

It is a lovely piece of science history, especially for a forum that spends so much time on quantum mechanics. Schrodinger is best known for his cat, so seeing another side of his thinking is fascinating. Debates about hidden variables continue today, decades after Bell's theorem

Do you think there is any deeper deterministic layer beneath quantum mechanics? And what other lost manuscripts might be waiting in archives?

A Lost Schrödinger Manuscript Reveals a Surprising Twist in Quantum Physicswww.sciencealert.com