Nobel Prize in Physics: Schrödinger (1933) and Born (1954)

Schrödinger received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory", which more precisely consisted in the mathematical formulation in a series of articles 1926 of an eigenvalue problem for a partial differential operator with eigenfunctions named wave functions and with eigenvalues in full agreement with the spectrum of the Hydrogen atom. 

The novelty of Schrödinger's model of the Hydrogen atom was the presence of a Laplacian differential operator acting on wave functions representing electron charge densities, and so presence of a form of energy measured by the gradient of the wave function, which was named kinetic energy although no motion was involved.

The mathematical model was coined Schrödinger's equation, which was quickly generalised to atoms with many electrons in cooperation with Heisenberg and Max Born, who gave the corresponding many-dimensional wave function a statistical interpretation. Heisenberg had already received the Prize in 1932 but Born had to wait until 1954, something he was not happy with at all. 

Born's statistical interpretation of the wave function is today accepted by most physicists, but many physicists strongly objected to physics as statistics in the beginning, including in particular Einstein and in Schrödinger himself, the sole creator of the Schrödinger equation for Hydrogen atom. In The Born-Einstein Letters Born expresses his feelings of not being properly treated by the Nobel Committee for so long:

• It was Heisenberg who reaped all the rewards of our work together, such as the Nobel Prize.
• For the last twenty years I have not been able to rid myself of a certain sense of injustice.
• The fact that I did not receive the Nobel Prize in 1932 together with Heisenberg hurt me very much at the time.
• If anyone is to blame it is the Swedes, who could quite well have found out about my contribution to quantum mechanics. 
• My surprise and joy were thus all the greater, especially as I was awarded the prize, not for the work done jointly with Heisenberg and Jordan, but for the statistical interpretation of Schroedinger’s wave function, which I had thought of and substantiated entirely by myself. 
• It is not surprising that this acknowledgement was delayed for twenty-eight years, for all the
  great names of the initial period of the quantum theory were opposed to the statistical interpretation: Planck, de Broglie, Schroedinger and, not least, Einstein himself. 
• It cannot have been easy for the Swedish Academy to act in opposition to voices which carried as much weight as theirs; therefore I had to wait until my ideas had become the common property
  of all physicists. 
• This was due in no small part to the cooperation of Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen school, which today lends its name almost everywhere to the line of thinking I originated.

Schrödinger refused to teach Born's statistical quantum mechanics from 1928 and then essentially gave up quantum mechanics for Eastern philosophy and biology. When Einstein died in 1955 the critique lost momentum and Born's statistical interpretation of the wave function took over.

The trouble with physics as statistics is that the real question of physics as what exists, is replaced by the question of what we can say (Bohr), ontology is thus replaced by epistemology. No wonder that the opposition was so strong initially. The reason Born won was that the critics had no real alternative like RealQM, which offers a new version of Schrödinger's equation with interpretation as real deterministic physics in 3d space. The spectrum of the Hydrogen atom is not of statistical nature. All Hydrogen atoms have the same spectrum.