This is a masterful biography, but one need to have a profound knowledge of higher mathematics and a basic one in physics to fully understand it.

Walter Moore shows that Schrödinger's life and thought was at least controversial.

Life
Schrödinger's personal itinerary is exemplary for the 20th century. He was born in a comfortable upper-middle class, but his parents lost their savings in the German inflation after WW I. The result was famine and diseases. It marked the rest of his life. As a young man he was confronted with unemployment and nearly left physics for financial reasons!
He found a decent job only at the age of 34. Even after winning the Nobel Prize he was still confronted with 'pension' problems.

Science
Walter Moore gives us a magisterial and detailed analysis of the scientific discoveries of ES, from his humble beginnings to the elaboration of the quantum wave function and after.
It shows that ES was above all a mathematical genius and a not so brilliant experimenter.
ES remained all his life opposed to the complemantary (particle/wave) interpretation of quantum mechanics (the 'Kopenhagen oracle' for ES). For him, there were only waves!

Sex
Beside science, sex was the principal occupation of his life, with all combinations imaginable. He lived a ménage à trois and sometimes à quatre, but still fell in love with other women, also with very young ones for he had a Lolita complex. He could without doubt have been accused of paedophilia.
But his intense love affairs stimulated highly his scientific creativity.
One can only wonder if his 'wild' behaviour and negative view of bourgeois marriage were not fundamentally influenced by the fact that he couldn't marry his first true love, because her family found that he was too poor!

Politics
He had a deep contempt for the governing classes (politicians, clergy) who 'enslave men by violence and use the religious desire of many people to promote superstition to rule over the dispossessed'. He also distrusted democracy!

Philosophical world view
This is certainly one of the strangest aspects of his thoughts.
He was convinced that physics provided absolutely no answers to philosophical questions (e. g. free will). All his life he remained, like Einstein, an adept of determinism.
His philosophical views and ethical principles were completely dissociated from his real life!
As an adept of the Vedanta, he believed the Buddhist wisdom that a thing could be both A and non-A (horribile dictu)!
He was also heavily influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

This work gives excellent explanations of the Vedanta, and the philosophy of Mach and Schopenhauer.
It contains a very painful paragraph on Heidegger.

I see only one minus point: the author doesn't give Bohr's pertinent response to the EPR-article against the Copenhagen interpretation of qm.

This is a brilliant book and certainly the definitive biography of Schrödinger. It is by no means a hagiography and doesn't dodge some 'weird' aspects of Schrödinger's life.
Not to be missed.

This book, is amazing. I came across it because I was forced to do a project for chemistry on Erwin Schrödinger, and I'm glad I did. It's a 512 page biography of him, and I think that says it all. It covers and extensive amount of ground, and is very useful for anyone doing any researh on the man. It gives a lot of background information about what was going on in his life, and the events in the world around him. Whenever he went to a new college, there was always some information on the college itself. If Schrödinger did research on a topic, there would be a small history on the scientist that came before him and how they affected him. The book is virtually packed with quotes form other people, letters, and speeches. One of the other things I liked was that it contained details of Schrödinger's personal life, such as his extramarital affairs and details on his marriage, and his family history. Want to see some pictures? There's that too. Bet you didn't know that Schrödinger wrote poetry. Well he did, and all of it is here too, in both German and an English translation. Another thing that makes the book stand out it that it is bery readable. Walter Moore did an excellent job writing the book, and it shows. I can say that you only need to read one book about Schrödinger: this one.

The 20th century has boasted a greater number of top-notch physicists than any prior epoch in history. The 21st century, and any future century beyond it, will be hard-pressed to match the level of scientific genius presented by the 20th. Names such as John Archibald Wheeler, Eugene Wigner, Paul Dirac, Max Planck, Louis deBroglie, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Hawking have set the standard for scientific and intellectual excellence.

Another name which belongs in this esteemed list is that of Erwin Schroedinger. Schroedinger influenced the field of quantum mechanics perhaps more than any other single scientific contributor of modern times. Here, Walter Moore has compiled his unique story so that all may have access to the life and times of this extraordinary man.

Moore's writing style is easily up to the task of keeping the interest of the reader. He does an excellent job of tracing Schroedinger's academic career as he obtained posts at the university of Jena, university of Zurich, university of Berlin [he was the hand-picked successor of none other than Max Planck], university of Oxford, university of Graz (Austria), the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the university of Vienna. Schroedinger was also offered professorships at 2 US universities as well (university of Wisconsin, Madison and Princeton university), but declined both. Moore does an exquisite job in his disinterment of all the facts, personal factors and politics behind S' decisions to transfer (or not to transfer) from post to post. Moore's elucidation of S' relationship with the Nazis (who called him "Politically unreliable") is exemplery, as is his coverage of the friendships and correspondence that S shared with his peers.

What makes Moore's biography superb is that he equally concentrates on S' personal life as well as his intellectual endeavors. Moore gives an authentic and upfront treatment of S' rather bizarre love arrangements. Like the composer Richard Wagner, S had many affairs with the wives of his friends (a few of which resulted in children), as well as myriad young woman just reaching adulthood. Moore offers a credible psycho-analysis of the motivations for his sexual conquests, and comparisons to the behavior of the persona in Nabokov's "Lolita" which Moore alludes to are certainly warranted.

Like all good modern biographies, the book is filled with plenty of pictures of the personages and locales which were integrated within S' life [including the immortal assemblage of the 1927 (5th) Solvay conference]. Also, for the mathematically inclined amongst us, the work is filled with a good many of the equations that S developed and worked on during his lifetime. The good news, for those of us not so mathematically inclined, is that an understanding of them is not essential to a generic comprehension of what S accomplished.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for all fans of and admirers of this great individual. People who have an interest in the history of science, physics in the 20th century, the philosophy of science and the psychology of the genius will also gain a great deal by reading this biographical treatise. Einstein once wrote S that "...you are my closest brother and your brain runs so similarly to mine" (p 426). This is a splendid illustration of just how pivotal he was to the history of science. In this biography, Moore set out to tell his story. HE DID!! HE DID!!

I am an advanced undergraduate physics student who has started to go through Space-Time Structure. It seems to be a very good book, but the section introducing tensors was not as lucid as it could be. If you already know tensors or have a good book like Shaum's Outline of Tensor Calculus, then it can be a very useful introduction to the affine viewpoint of relativity that Schrodinger promotes. The discussion of nonsymmetric unified field theories is introductory and it would be necessary to look up the references it cites to get a more in depth understanding of them.

This book presents the results of Schroedinger's work in Ireland in which he explored the manifold of possibilities for unified field theories along the general lines pursued by Einstein. The main accomplishment was in constructing such a theory from just the connection, with metric derived as a consequence, using no ad hoc assumptions. I extended this work in my 1977 Master's thesis. While this kind of theory has gone out of style, it is still an exciting pursuit and Schroedinger's writing is clear and compelling.

I'm twelve right about now, and I have my own theory of time.Time (the fourth dimension) is arranged on separate lines, like thefirst dimension. The fifth dimension is arranged in time planes and the sixth in time cubes. The fourth dimension, however, is simpler than those. Imagine infinite lines in space, each stacked one on another. These we will call "time lines". From these infinite lines spread more infinite lines. We'll call these "destiny lines". Then there are more and more destiny lines branching from those destiny lines, and so on and so forth. They get very complicated. Time lines are the original paths of time. Destiny lines are the lines of time determined by what happens along the time lines. Sounds confusing? Well, anything you do creates a new destiny line. As I write this, I am creating a new destiny line. The future may be different if I didn't write this at all. Time planes are the collection of one timeline and all destiny lines spreading from it. Time cubes are the colletion of all time planes. It's kinda weird ;)

Yes it is unbelievable, not the book itself but the life of Schrodinger. This book is the abridged version of the original from same publisher at three times of the cost of this book. What you are missing is the theoretical part of his physics. Book basically covers his personal life with touch and go to Physical concepts. You do not get the ideas, how he developed the wave mechanics and other new concepts. What is striking is his life story, his running after fourteen years old teenagers, sleeping with his best friends wife or his wife sleeping with his best friends son, what a life, I could not believe. This was a schoking book for me, I, with my naivete perhaps did not expect such a behavior from a nobel lauriete and all the famous physisict of his time who knew about it and accepted him as he was. If he lived now he would have been in jail for child malestation. book is basically about his personal life from one love story to another which by the way at the conclusion of each love story he discovers something. if you want to read more about his life together with his physics, this is not the book, you need to read the original.

Few physicists influenced their subject, both operationally and philosophically, as did Erwin Schrodinger. It was with great anticipation, then, that I began this book. Indeed, having read previously the outstanding accounts of Bohr (by Pais) and Heisenberg (by Cassidy), I hoped to be 'wowed' for a third time. Unfortunatley, Moore's book is a supreme disappointment and, aside from the fact that it deals with a towering figure of 20th century physics, has nothing in common with the other two. Moore is unable, or unwilling, to separate the relevant from the ridiculous in his narrative. Equal space (? even more) is given to the soporific details of Schrodinger's travels (yet another vapid description of a yet another love affair) as is devoted to an analysis of his work or even to the influences on his life and intellect.

Of all biographies, the scientific kind may be the most challenging type to write well. To be sucessful the author of a scientific biography must under! stand the science, the person and the world in which the person lived. Moore seems to knows the details and he must surely understand the prerequisites. It is a shame that he was unable to meld these details together with more skill and unable to convey his insights to the reader. Schrodinger deserved better.