Humanistic thinking played a significant role in the thought of one of modern physics’ greatest figures, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, whose work extended far beyond his contributions to quantum mechanics. Nonconformist that he was, Schrödinger was also a prolific cultural writer, whose work drew on modernist cultural themes well beyond his own professional field, particularly the critique of Western scientific and objectivist thought as refracted through his fascination with Eastern Vedic philosophy. Though this fascination was amateur, it had far-reaching implications for Schrödinger’s views on science, not only in his native field of physics, but also in the field of biology. I argue that Schrödinger can be claimed as a modernist figure moving between the two “cultures" of science and the humanities. Schrödinger’s interest in Vedic philosophy informed not only his position within the metaphysical crisis surrounding quantum mechanics in the first half of the 20th century, but also his forays across scientific disciplinary boundaries and into the field of biology, where his musings (inspirational to Watson, Crick and Wilkins), borrowed from the wider modernist Germanic cultural tradition of Lebensphilosphie, as Vitalism was then known in the German-speaking world. This paper argues that, problematic though his dedication to Vedic philosophy may have been, it cannot be disentangled from his scientific thinking.
