The view of an era

Schrödinger himself, as disconcerted as anyone by quantum theory’s lack of description, figured that it was simply incomplete — a conclusion his contemporary Albert Einstein shared, pointedly asking one colleague if he truly believed that the moon wasn’t there when no one was looking. But to most of the other founders of quantum mechanics, in particular the highly influential Niels Bohr, the theory’s limitations simply signaled that physics had reached a dead end.