Schrödinger's Lost Manuscript Surfaces After Eight Decades, Questions Cherished Belief

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — An unpublished manuscript by Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist best known for his cat in a box, has come to light after some eighty years, according to a report in The Debrief. It concerns whether the randomness of quantum mechanics is a basic feature of nature or merely a lack of information.

The finding is described in a preprint posted to arXiv on October 14, 2026, by Flavio Del Santo, a researcher at the University of Geneva. The report states that the three handwritten pages had remained largely overlooked among Schrödinger's papers at the University of Vienna.

The manuscript answers a dispute that revived in 1943, when the mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker argued that quantum predictions clashed with hidden-variable explanations. His example was a light polarizer. If a hidden property of the light had already settled whether it would pass, he reasoned, then turning the polarizer mid-flight should not change the result. Satyendra Nath Bose offered a related argument the following year in Nature, according to the report.

Heinrich Pelzer later challenged Whittaker's reasoning. Meanwhile, the article says, Schrödinger built a hidden-variable model more elaborate than Whittaker's. Del Santo examined it mathematically and found, according to the report, that its predictions for polarized light agreed with those of quantum mechanics.

The manuscript is dated November 1944. Del Santo suggests Schrödinger may have dropped the problem once he learned of Pelzer's work. The article adds that the debate returned in the 1950s and 1960s. Del Santo, it says, finds the document especially intriguing given Schrödinger's reputation for a deterministic outlook, and sees in it a physicist willing to test the foundations of his own assumptions.