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Kicking Erwin Schrödinger out of my idols. Not because he chose a cat for his thought experiment, but because of one thing I learnt: he sexually abused children and kept a diary about it. 🤮 Src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Sexual_abuse

#schrodinger #quantum #physics

A digital drawing colored with digital watercolor. Carrot, my red tabby cat comic character is kicking the ass on the edge of a cliff to a cartoon representation of Erwin Schrödinger. This one holds a box with a laser, a hammer and a bottle of poison. The ingredient of his famous his "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment.
what an absolute shame!

What?

F... 🤮

How did you learn it?

@globcoco I learnt it thanks to a post (in French) by @etcetera
https://framapiaf.org/deck/@etcetera@c.im/111470362386014100 , I then told them in PM about my intention to relay the info not as a boost, but with a cartoon. The reason: I had a scenario for a future episode in draft with a big reference to Schrödinger's cat experiment. I immediately put it to trash without regret.

@etcetera

I really love your ethic David.

(J'irais le lire).

@etcetera

C'est effectivement à vomir !

On l'a jamais inculpé ?

@jrod3737 Same, I was sad reference [43] was behind this very strong paywall. I couldn't also digg into this part because of that.
l'article en français, ne semble pas y faire référence.

eh, thanks for ruining my otherwise perfect Sunday 😕

Geez, this passage from Wikipedia is disgusting:

he stated a "predilection for teenage girls on the grounds that their innocence was the ideal match for his natural genius"

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

@lutzray Yes, disguting. I learnt it yesterday and then I couldn't believe most of the biography I read or portrait on video put that big part of his life to silence. Even the French Wikipedia page doesn't mention it ...

Btw, sorry for the bad 'sunday timing'. I couldn't hold this info I learnt yesterday evening, I had to make a a drawing about it to reflect about it. Schrödinger cat box is so pop culture. I saw it on so many meme...

it's just one more name on the list of famous physicists who didn't know what to do with their dick...

https://www.natgeotv.com/za/special/genius-albert-einsteins-theory-of-infidelity

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-feynman-mcneill

Does celebrity induce sexual predatory behaviours? And is it specifically 'male'? (I doubt it).

Sadly, I won't ever know the answer 😏 I'm too old to become famous.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Celebrate ideas, never people: people tend to have many bad ideas beyond the few good ones for which they have become famous. Schrödinger is a good example of that: he was a horrible person.

Oof, this makes being named after him a rather grim topic from now on :c

:ReplyNo:

[Edited because I got too many replies]

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

@eest9 Oh no, I'm sorry for you. 😔

I don't think that information was publicly available until quite recently. I watch a lot of science videos and I've never heard of this.

A friend recently told me something about this kind of thing: when a band, a personality, a character has this thing, it's a new death for them. You were named when the clean and brilliant reputation was still alive and only info available. I hope you'll be able to keep the positive aspect of this name.

I hope so. I'll probably tell the origin story of my name far less in the future and exclusively with a note in regard to this.

Yes, it looks like the oldest mention is a biography from 1990, and it wasn't widely recognized until 2021, when more information about it came public?

I don't know. Pages like the French one on Wikipedia doesn't even mention it...

[edit: Someone added the info to the FR wikipedia page 10min ago, thanks! https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger&action=history 👍 ]

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
C'est répugnant. Et le pire c'est que je suis certain qu'une vaste partie de l'humanité n'en a rien a foutre. :blobfoxdeadinside:
@pepper1700 Oh oui. Le gars est décédé en 1961, et ça refait surface dans sa bio Wikipedia (en Anglais, toujours pas en Français d'ailleurs) seulement récemment. Comme si les infos était sortie du néant après 2021. Il y a du avoir de longs silences pour protéger un héritage de réputation et de grand homme de science... Dégoutant.
Put it into 12ft.io, I just tried it and it works to get around the paywall

@piggo Thank you for this tool. First time I met it. I'll keep it on my bookmarks. Also, I received thanks to other another cool option: the 'Internet Archives' method when the article wasn't behind a paywall I guess. Cool method, I'll also try to remember that.

@jrod3737

@carlschwan Thanks for maintaining this Wiki page, difficult topic. 👍
I'm not maintaining it, it's just a list of famous french intellectuals who signed a petition against the age of consent and many of them were involved in child grooming 🙁
@elzen Coucou. Ha oui, utile. Mais je ne pense pas que je tiendrai rigueur à quiquonque d'être élogieux avec l'homme comme ces infos sont encore (et c'est surprenant alors qu'il est mort en 1961) très fraîche. Peut-être dans cinq ans d'ici là si ça ce sait plus, ça sera un peu plus problématique d''être élogieux.
Ici, j'avais un scénario en cours très "Schrödinger-centric" avec Pepper qui demandais à Carrot d'inviter ses potes pour faire une expérience avec boites, potion et marteau. Poubelle.
@Christo I know... But I always had this bias to old scientifics, you know: Isaac Newton, Paul Dirac, Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, etc... For me this one was a solid 'part of the band' of my group of persons I liked to read biography, see video about their accomplishement and all. His 'Schrödinger's cat' is so pop-culture now. I laughted at so many meme.
I grief I'll not enjoy all of this in the same way now.

I should point out that my username is mainly a reference to the famous thought experiment.

I am not ignoring or condoning his abuse.

FYI, there is also a lecture room named after him in ENS Lyon. I've heard rumours that renaming was underway. At least people are advised to call it "the main physics lecture hall" in order to avoid the now infamous name.
A much better quantum physicist is Werner Heisenberg, who, unlike Schrödinger, was a devout Evangelical Lutheran. Maybe put Heisenberg in his place?
La liste des personnalités adulées qui s'étaient comportés comme des crevards est affreusement longue. Je crois qu'on devrait séparer l'artiste de son oeuvre, parce que si on se met à jeter les réalisations de toutes personnes qui ont été unsafe, ça risque d'être une hécatombe.
@stemy Tu as raison. Reste cependant le dégout qui donne moins envie de citer sous forme de pop-culture humoristique l'expérience du chat Schrödinger; un projet que j'avais pour les prochains épisode de Pepper&Carrot mais qui va être réecrit pour le coup car j'ai plus la motiv de faire des éloges indirectement au bonhomme après ça.
I'm pleased to see more people learning this. People who have been spreading this information are a small but growing group.

If you go dig just a tiny bit there’s an awful lot of terrible things to find about a lot now dead famous people.

Several famous authors had terrible sides, as well as scientists. The movie industry is completely filled with horrors.

Not saying your reaction is wrong, quite the opposite. Just saying it’s sadly pretty easy. 🙁

(I think you would make a pretty good political cartoonist. But I quite enjoy your work in general.)

À la lumière de ces révélation, peut-on dire qu'on l'apprécie et ne l'apprécie pas en même temps ?
@stemy 👏 👏 👏 , Touché !
Oumf. I knew about it (I learnt it recently), and it's so, so painful. « Jamais de héros » is my motto, but it's difficult to maintain.

@lamecarlate Oh yes, difficult to follow this motto that I understand perfectly!

(But then my brain starts exception for Pratchett, Bowie, Toriyama, Loomis, Tsukasa Hojo, etc... etc... 😆)

holy fuck, had no idea, that's absolutely disgusting
Thanks for this info. I will try to never refer to him again. Maybe I'll only ever call it the "Quantum Cat" experiment?
Minutes after reading this, I learned that the creator of the famous Gill Sans font, also called the "British Helvetica," Eric Gill, had sex with his daughters, his sisters and his dog. Is today National Disillusionment Day?
@eribosot 😱 It looks like it is...
I'll never look at the logos of the BBC, Tommy Hilfiger, Wikimedia or Philips the same way again.
😮 Get in the box, Erwin.
I'm pretty sure Hatsune Miku is the progenitor of quantum mechanics and the inventor of the cat-box thought experiment
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

"predilection for teenage girls on the grounds that their innocence was the ideal match for his natural genius"

This is the most disgusting diary entry I've ever read *puke*

@jrod3737

You can access most paywalled material if you have a library card.

Mine uses PressReader.

I mean saddened that he did that.
WHAT?!?!!? I am saddened to hear that. Too much suffering sometimes.

One of the relatively unacknowledged risks to public health is the sexual abuse of children.

So much evidence of societal trauma exists, yet it is ignored as a public health issue.

South Korean & Japanese women so traumatized by the rampant misogyny of their cultures, that the birth rate had plummeted.

Male supremacy has economic consequences
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/south-korea-fertility-rate-misogyny-feminism/673435/

New Zealand evidence that child victims of sexual abuse have reduced life expectancy of 10 to 20 years less
1/2

Residential schools & child sexual abuse in New Zealand, Australia, UK, & Canada
https://www.news.library.auckland.ac.nz/2017/10/06/native-schools/
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/quite-genocide/index.html

Irish & Italian Catholic abuse that triggered a diaspora of immigrants & rates of alcoholism
https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.53.8.1001

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/11/pressure-on-italy-catholic-church-face-child-sexual-abuse-reckoning

American churches hiding massive sexual abuse scandals (Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Jewish, Jehovah Witness, Sikh, etc) and an onslaught of gun violence & suicidal behavior.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/31/feature/the-epidemic-of-denial-about-sexual-abuse-in-the-evangelical-church/
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/illinois-catholic-church-child-abuse-rcna86289

@Npars01 Thank you for all this links to continue on the topic. I'll probably read them another evening. It's a bit too heavy and I need to dip only a small toes into these waters for a limited time per day. But I'll do as I think information about it must be spread and understood by the largest part possible of the population.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Good thing to learn. Again a case of "great people are not necessarily good people".
wtf that's awful I had no idea either
I didn't know he did such things!
Couldn't agree more. Now we just need to rebaptise the Schrodinger equation. "Non-relativistic Klein-Gordon equation" is a bit clunky though 🙁
@breizh @stemy De toute façon, la science, l'equation reste 'vrai jusqu'a preuve du contraire', et j'imagine que plein de monde dégeux ont fait avancé la science, pour parfois de très mauvaise raisons (je fais confiance à l'humanité pour une multitude d'exemples bien sordide).
La partie à jeter: les salles d'amphis à son nom, ou de l'éloges posthumes.
Le côté "Chat de Schrödinger" expérience de pensé provocante et marquante restera sans doute dans la pop-culture longtemps...
Unfortunately quite a number of smart guys had very reprehensible behaviors/ideas/talks... I may be pessimistic but I think the contrast between their public and private faces makes that shocking but more anonymous people than we dare to imagine have the same problems.

@libroraptor Yes, at least his paragraph on Wikipedia is well detailed for whomever wants to get the info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gill#Sexual_abuse .

I just hope poeple will check this before praising the historical figures, to not make more statues or more golden letters to them. The knowledge is now public and sourced.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut is a great book of new fiction which includes Schrödinger and other physicists with all their foibles. Very good reading, despite Erwin's crimes.
Oh, this is something I wished I didn’t know and read

Sounds like narcissism. It's pathological, incurable, and should be tested for.

"Schrödinger kept a record of his sexual liaisons including children he sexually abused in a diary he called Ephemeridae, in which he stated a "predilection for teenage girls on the grounds that their innocence was the ideal match for his natural genius".

@piggo @jrod3737 in a few browser „reader mode“ also works in this case
@photex insert glib comment about the superpositional nature of people who you haven’t looked into yet

I am, again, reassured that my conviction to not have heroes, is justified.

I can respect specific things people do, but I don't assume that means they're good people. More weakly, I don't even assume they've not done bad things.

@piggo @jrod3737 sadly, 12ft isn't as effective as it used to be, and more often than not it won't unlock articles anymore :/

I've seen https://1ft.io/ being used here and there.

WTF

Schrödinger kept a record of his sexual liaisons including children he sexually abused in a diary he called Ephemeridae, in which he stated a "predilection for teenage girls on the grounds that their innocence was the ideal match for his natural genius".

@echedelle Hi, thank you. I'm affraid if I edit now it will pop in top of the notification of everyone who interacted with the post, and I propably want to avoid this effect now.
I already had two feedback in PM about this, I discussed and, yes, sorry, I feel a CW would have been appropriate to not be exposed by this topic.
I'm learning.
At the same time, the content I put here is minimal, similar to what the title of the CW would have been. The link is the real content, and require action.

@Bibobu Yes, an edit that happened after I published this post. ( src: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger&action=history ) and it is a good thing. Thanks to the Wikipedian user who did this update and probably keep an eye on the comments here! 💜

(also, yay, French page mention it https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Abus_sexuels )

@jrod3737

Somehow, that disgusting part of his life was never mentioned in the numerous lectures about his life's achievements. (And I went pretty far in physics academia.)

It's really shocking.
Hope that with more reckoning, naming and shaming, these atrocities will end.

Ughh, shit. Did not know that. Thank you for teaching me this. Awful!!!!
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
ewwww! Wasn't aware of this.
genius and good character are orthogonal to each other
yes, and it was written in every biography like it was nothing and despite knowing that they still called him a science hero whos name you can put on everything for decades
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Also, the cat thought experiment is dumb, because you can't actually shield a box from things like gravity.

If you did, you could essentially never open it back up -- it would be a new universe.

Anyway, art, artist. Humans can be terrible (and in this case, clearly was,) so I prefer the ideas which can have their own life!

#Sexual_abuse #schrodinger #quantum #physics

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000132657725/erwin-schroedinger-missbrauchstaeter-undoder-rufmordopfer

Wikipedia verlinkt als Quelle obigen Artikel, der wesentliche Differenziertes sagt als die Wikipedia. Das sagt zumindest mal nix gutes über die Artikelqualität der WP 😑 wenn man eine Quelle so "zusammenfasst" und dabei zum gegenteiligen Schluss kommt.

Unabhängig davon sind die Vorwürfe, dazu weiß ich nix 🤷, aber Zweifel dürften mir aktuell noch angebracht sein.

Lesen lohnt sich jedenfalls.

#Sexual_abuse #schrodinger #quantum #physics

In short, if you read the article from DerStandard, it sounds to me very much like Schrödinger knew exactly where to draw the line, skirted close but never crossed it.

Very different from how wikipedia summarizes the article.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
@xro Can't read: German and Paywall.
Also, according to the paragraph on Wikipedia, he crossed the line big time with disastrous outcomes.
@xro
I've freed it for you via deepl: https://pads.c3w.at/code/#/2/code/view/mkeleYsMwpZhMMVlxxLUHW6xbo7-1oxEN2KS5ewEc9g/present/ (although I'm not aware of a paywall at derstandard) @xro I'm not that convinced from that article. It all comes down to if Moore reported his findings correct or if they were incorrect (minor dating errors aside). That nobody after him got access to the diaries makes me rather skeptical.
@xro
@eest9 @xro Thanks for the translation and the link.
@eest9 @xro Ha, my bad about the paywall: it was probably a screen obscuring the content about aproval for cookies, or a adv for subscribing; but because it was all in German, I thought it was a Paywall adv because the content behind was shadowed and with limited amount of character. I clicked a random button, and the article appeared.
@Harald Hi, please use the 'Talk' tab of the Wikipedia article if you think you have a new source or link and want to contribute. It will be lost if you post the link here without context (especialy because this is an article in German, and I can't read it, but I already did because someone on other comments sent it to me translated in English with DeepL.)
Sorry, what do you mean with the 'Talk' tab?
@Harald Hi, if you open the Wikipedia page, and scroll on the top; under the title of the article you have a menu with a "Talk" entry. This section is where editor on Wikipedia and contributor talks to improve the article.
Because you just dropped a link, I thought you wanted to add a source to the article, but you didn't know how to do it. So I tried to guide you to the right part of Wikipedia to do so.

Aha - ok, that's good. I will look ...

And thank you!

So, I have had a look in the 'Talk' tab (german: Diskussion): there is already a discussion about the article in the "Standard" and about the wrong information about Schrödingers relationship to children - it was a typical german thing: without real knowledge, lurid claims are made ...
Yep. Horrendous. Remember reading about this in John Gribbin's biography of Schrodinger in 2012
Notre logo y fait référence ! https://boc47.org/

@pm2000 Fortunately, logo like that are still pretty neutral as long as there is no bottle of poison and hammer (the element of the experiment of thought that does reference) just a cat in a box is not a direct reference.

In the comments here, some proposed to just use the name "Quantum cat" instead of naming it "Schrödinger cat", this way it avoids to send too much praising while keeping the pop culture element.

never was my "idol" or anything but HF!
oh, that famous never-failing wiki-proof, which references the not publicly available dairy and some biography written by a no-name in 2012. It’s pathetic.