The Continuous Mind

In the winter of 1925, in a snowbound Swiss hotel, a physicist wrote down an equation that changed the world.

To most readers, the Schrödinger equation is a wall of symbols. To a hydrogeologist, it looks strangely familiar. It has the same mathematical shape as the law that governs water seeping through rock. One letter makes the difference: the imaginary number i, which turns a fading pressure into a travelling wave.

Dr Priyadarshi Dravid spent his working life with the equations of groundwater, from the aquifers of New Zealand to the fresh-water lenses of Pacific islands. In The Continuous Mind, he brings that rare perspective to one of the most brilliant and troubling figures of modern science.

Follow Erwin Schrödinger

from Boltzmanns Vienna to the sun temple of Konark from a secret holiday at Arosa to the birth of wave mechanics from Einsteins sailing boat to the cat in the steel chamber from wartime exile in Dublin to What Is Life?, the little book that inspired the discoverers of DNA

Along the way, discover why Schrödinger loved the Upanishads, how one conviction ran through his physics, his philosophy and his private life (that nothing in the universe is truly separate), and why that same conviction became, in his conduct, a failure to respect boundaries that harmed real people.

Inside this book

Every equation explained in plain English, with no mathematics required 20 original illustrations of waves, orbitals and the science of water Simple experiments to try at home with a rope, a glass of water or a handful of rice A fresh reading of Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita by an author raised within the tradition An honest, carefully sourced reckoning with the man behind the mathematics

Part science, part biography, part meditation on unity and responsibility, this book is for every curious reader who has wondered what quantum mechanics really says, and what it means to see the world as one.

A mind that heard the atom sing, and the boundaries it would not see.

Scroll up and begin the journey.