- 1 - Schrödinger and Indian Philosophy Michel Bitbol CNRS, Paris, France Transcript of a conference given at the French embassy in India, New Delhi, January 1998 Published in: Cahiers du service culturel de l’ambassade de France en Inde, Allahabad, August 1999 1 Schrödinger’s Life, and First Contacts with Indian Thought The topic of my talk today is “Schrödinger and Indian Philosophy”. You certainly do have some knowledge about Erwin Schrödinger, the celebrated author of the “Schrödinger equation” of Quantum mechanics. But I think it would be better for me to assume that you need additional information. I shall then begin with a short biographical sketch of Schrödinger, putting special emphasis on his strong and early interest for Indian soteriological philosophies. Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna (Austria) in 1887. After Secondary School, he began his studies of Physics at the University of Vienna in 1906. He already displayed at that time an extraordinary interest for philosophy, besides his taste for Physics. The first authors who attracted his philosophical attention were the Greek pre- socratics, Plato, Hume, the Viennese philosopher of science Ernst Mach and most remarkably, as a diary written in 1905 shows us, the main trends of Indian philosophy. His training in Physics bore the mark of the disciples of Ludwig Boltzmann, which explains his own epistemological orientation towards clear pictures of physical processes. But he was also influenced by Ernst Mach’s radical positivism and this explains in turn his constant criticism directed against a metaphysical realist construal of scientific objects or structures, which would go beyond the methodological realism that scientists find so useful. His first scientific writings, between 1911 and 1922, deal with many topics such as the theory of fluctuations in statistical mechanics, the