ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER AND HIS MILIEU
THE COLLECTION OF SCHRÖDINGER'S ASSISTANT
SCHRÖDINGER, Erwin, et al.
A collection of offprints and papers from the library of Nándor Balázs.
1902–1961.
Small archive of 45 offprints and papers, various sizes, very well preserved; including presentation copies, many bearing the ownership stamp of Erwin Schrödinger.
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A collection of offprints and papers from the library of Nándor Balázs.
A remarkable collection of offprints and papers from the library of Hungarian-American physicist Nándor Balázs, laboratory assistant in the early 1950s to the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, comprising an exceptionally strong core of Schrödinger’s works – many of which stamped for presentation by the author or from his own library – as well as a notable complement of articles by the likes of Heisenberg, Dirac, Hilbert, Carathéodory, and Levi-Civita.
From autumn 1952 to summer 1953, Balázs (1926–2003) assisted Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he was Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama from 1953 to 1956. He went on to a successful academic career at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, and Stony Brook University. Throughout his life, Balázs had close friendships and working collaborations with Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac (Dirac’s wife, Margit Wigner, was Hungarian), inter alia.
Schrödinger achieved some of the most momentous results in the field of quantum theory and is considered – with Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others – one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century. This collection of printed works, spanning from 1900 to the end of Schrödinger’s life, comprises many of his most celebrated works.
Among them are his most famous thought experiment, ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, Berlin, 1935); two copies of his very first work, Die Leitung der Elektrizität auf der Oberfläche von Isolatoren an feuchter Luft (Vienna, 1910), likely belonging to Schrödinger himself, on the conduction of electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air, published a month after it first appeared in an academic publication; Schrödinger’s own copy of the very rare offprint issue of Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem (Quantisation as an Eigenvalue Problem, Leipzig, 1926), the work that brought his research into the general arena and helped launch his great fame; a printed copy in German, published in Stockholm in 1934, of Schrödinger’s December 1933 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, likely his own copy; and fourteen intimately related works by other scientists, including fundamental papers by Heisenberg, Hilbert, and Hopf.
A full listing of the collection, with bibliography, simultaneously is and is not available on request.
