Just a few months after de Broglie's suggestion, Schrödinger took the decisive step... by determining an equation that governs the shape and the evolution of probability waves, or as they became known, wave functions. It was not long before Schrödinger's equation and the probabilistic interpretation were being used to make wonderfully accurate predictions. By 1927, therefore, classical innocence had been lost. Gone were the days of a clockwork universe whose individual constituents were set in motion at some moment in the past and obediently fulfilled their inescapable, uniquely determined destiny. According to quantum mechanics, the universe evolves according to a rigorous and precise mathematical formalism, but this framework determines only the probability that any particular function will happen—not which future actually ensues.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Just a few months after de Broglie's suggestion, Schrödinger took the decisive step... by determining an equation that governs the shape and the evolution of probability waves, or as they became known, wave functions. It was not long before Schrödinger's equation and the probabilistic interpretation were being used to make wonderfully accurate predictions. By 1927, therefore, classical innocence had been lost. Gone were the days of a clockwork universe whose individual constituents were set in motion at some moment in the past and obediently fulfilled their inescapable, uniquely determined destiny. According to quantum mechanics, the universe evolves according to a rigorous and precise mathematical formalism, but this framework determines only the probability that any particular function will happen—not which future actually ensues." in the context of "Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999) Ch. 4 Microscopic Weirdness, p. 107." to mean that wisdom is timeless.