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Bose, Schrödinger, and the Determinism Debate
Gained knowledge, lost faith: S. N. Bose, Schrödinger, and the 1944 determinism debate
In October 2026, a physics historian in Geneva, Flavio Del Santo, published three handwritten pages that had sat in the Schrödinger Archive in Vienna for more than 80 years. The title on the first page was “Collapse of Determinism.” Most of the coverage ran it as a lost manuscript with a twist. Schrödinger, the man usually filed next to Einstein, had built a hidden-variable model. That is the kind of thing a determinist builds.
The twist that caught me sits a few paragraphs further into Del Santo’s paper. He names the two talks that restarted the determinism debate in the 1940s. One was E. T. Whittaker’s Guthrie Lecture in London in May 1943. The other was Satyendra Nath Bose’s presidential address to the Indian Science Congress in Delhi on 3 January 1944. A report on Bose’s address ran in Nature in July 1944 under the same title Schrödinger later used. Del Santo calls that report “the real trigger.” Schrödinger’s three pages were his unpublished answer to the argument that followed.
So the chain runs Delhi, then London, then Vienna. An address given in India set off the debate that Schrödinger’s lost manuscript was written to settle. One caution before going on. Schrödinger’s model rebuts Whittaker’s specific photon argument…
