Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian physicist, one of the founders of quantum theory, and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. His ideas were heavily influenced by monist philosophy and he is particularly well known for original interpretations of the significance of the wave function and for devising the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.