Feynman (Source: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. Some of the arguments he used were even false, but that does not matter the only important thing is that the ultimate equation gives a correct description of nature.” - Richard P. “When Schrödinger first wrote it down, he gave a kind of derivation based on some heuristic arguments and some brilliant intuitive guesses. Creativity is a very big part of physics. Dirac did it too when he obtained his Dirac equation for the electron by pretending he could take the square root of the Klein-Gordon operator (which is second order in time). It is a very creative (sometimes not logical!) art with mathematics in attempting to understand the physical world. correct description of nature.4 Against this compliant attitude, Feynman himself provided us with a derivation of the Schrödinger equation that led him to the path integral formulation of quantum field theory.5, 6 Responding to the same stimulus and in the hope of a sound explanation of the equation, many other physicists have come up with. It has been my experience in reading physics that this sort of “heuristic” reasoning is part of doing physics.
I thought it is interesting to see what the great Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman said about Erwin Schrödinger’s attempts to discover the famous Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics (see quote below).
