Drunk Schrödinger cartoons
Schrödinger in 1933. From Wikipedia
Erwin Schrödinger is best known for his famous equation, and his unfortunate cat. He also wrote a fascinating book called What is life?1, in which he looked at life from the perspective of physics. It’s a fascinating book and I wished I had discovered it when I did my Biology degree.
However the book is written in a rather difficult style. Schrödinger himself had developed the bizarre style of speaking in English that was popular for educated people at that time2. Reading the book I thought that many of the points he was trying to make could be made much more succinctly, and I got the idea of a drunk Schrödinger in a bar trying to explain his ideas to his unenthusiastic fellow drinkers.
2 Here’s a recording of Schrödinger giving a talk on BBC radio in 1949 on the topic “Do Electrons Think?”
The first cartoon is based on a section of What is Life? titled What is entropy?. This is the relevant bit:
Every process, event, happening - call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy - or, as you may say, produces positive entropy - and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death.
This second cartoon is inspired by a section of the book about the size of atoms:
Now, why are atoms so small?
Clearly, the question is an evasion. For it is not really aimed at the size of the atoms. It is concerned with the size of organisms, more particularly with the size of our own corporeal selves.
The final cartoon was inspired by part of the explanation about the size of atoms:
Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
I put 200 atoms rather than 100 molecules because I thought it sounded better to talk about atoms than molecules. A molecule of water of course contains three atoms, and “a glass” is a vague measurement, so I thought it was ok to make this change.
The book doesn’t mention dinosaur piss, but I guess a drunk Schrödinger might.
I created these comics on the iPad using the Procreate app. I did the text in the last one in the Concepts app (I think it looks a bit better). If I were to do this again I think I would do all the line work and writing with fiber-tip pen and paper, and just use the iPad to neaten things up and do the tints. I did think I could rewrite the whole book in the form of comics like this, but I was happy I’d got to the standard I wanted with that last comic, and had some new ideas I wanted to explore.
