The physical basis of Schrodinger's theory was this: Ordinarily, one can think of a particle as a dot; but one should really visualize it as a little clump of waves, a ''standing wave'' in today's parlance. Don't bother thinking of electrons as particles, Schrodinger said, and forget about this quantum-leap business. Just apply rules of wave interactions. Beyond constructing a mechanism for particle interactions, Schrodinger linked the quantum world of the microscopic to the classical world of macroscopic objects. Waves now existed, figuratively speaking, in atoms as well as in oceans. Physicists could understand waves, which they had endlessly studied. Schrodinger's wave mechanics saved quantum theory and at the same time threatened its underpinnings. It utilized continuous phenomena, waves, to explain the discontinuous quantum world of the atom.

For this, Schrodinger earned the Nobel Prize in Physics (in 1933) and the undying enmity of the great Werner Heisenberg. Schrodinger had destroyed Heisenberg's precious matrices. Schrodinger was old. He was an outsider from Zurich, not part of the Gottingen-Copenhagen quantum clique. Worst of all, he was right. The clique felt compelled to retaliate. Pauli referred to Schrodinger's views as ''Zurich superstitions.'' Heisenberg was less charitable, calling the theory ''abominable'' and worse. Heisenberg would later eat his words. In 1927 he incorporated Schrodinger's wave functions as an integral part of his uncertainty principle.

How does one explain Schrodinger's sudden burst of genius, uncommon even in that post-World War I era of uncommon geniuses? The man appears to have been extraordinarily common. The picture of Schrodinger that emerges from Mr. Moore's book is one of a conceited, selfish, childish, hopelessly middle-class nerd, one who worried about his awards and medals and was obsessed with his pension and salary. (He didn't accept an offer from Princeton University because it wouldn't give him parity with Einstein.) He even drove a BMW. Mr. Moore is exhaustive in his research of Schrodinger's life, but, as in a scientific paper, he is heavy on data and parsimonious in his explanation of that data. Mr. Moore is a chemist and - if you'll forgive the cheap shot - the book is more of a quantitative analysis than a deep psychological portrait. On the other hand, his objectivity allows him to study candidly, and nonjudgmentally, two major obsessions of Schrodinger's life - the Eastern philosophy of Vedanta and sex.

Mr. Moore informs us that Schrodinger kept a series of ''little black books'' in which he recorded the names of all his loves with a code to indicate ''the denouement,'' as the author puts it, of each affair. He unbuttons Schrodinger's code and reveals a life of stunning promiscuity. Schrodinger admitted he detested his wife, Anny, sexually, and took on a series of mistresses, three of whom bore him illegitimate daughters. Immediately after his triumph in wave mechanics, he agreed to tutor 14-year-old twin girls named Withi and Ithi Junger. Schrodinger called the latter ''Ithy-bitty'' and regularly fondled her during their math lessons. He finally seduced her when she was 17, assuring her she wouldn't get pregnant. She did, Schrodinger immediately lost interest in her, and the girl underwent a disastrous abortion that left her sterile. He then took on Hilde March, the wife of his assistant Arthur March, as his mistress, and she bore him a daughter. March, ever the dutiful assistant, agreed to be named the father, while his wife moved eventually into the Schrodinger household to serve as Schrodinger's ''second wife.'' Well, the great man's sordid affairs go on and on, and Mr. Moore faithfully serves up all of the titillating details. He concludes that Schrodinger needed ''tempestuous sexual adventures'' to inspire his great discoveries. Unfortunately, the notebook for the critical year 1925 has disappeared, so the woman who erotically guided Schrodinger to his famous wave equation, ''like the dark lady who inspired Shakespeare's sonnets,'' the biographer tells us, ''may remain forever mysterious.''

As for Vedanta, the recent rash of new-age physics writers will be chagrined to learn that Schrodinger himself rejected the idea that philosophical conclusions can be drawn from wave mechanics or any work in theoretical physics. But Mr. Moore believes that Vedanta - which holds that through the Self one can comprehend the essence of the universe - may have been instrumental in Schrodinger's discovery of wave mechanics. Much has been written about Schrodinger's insistence that the electron is not a particle; it doesn't just behave like a wave, he said, but rather is a wave, as real as a radio wave or an ocean wave. This belief of Schrodinger's, soon discarded by other physicists, is played down by Mr. Moore, who points out that Schrodinger actually wavered on this point very early on.

After wave mechanics, Schrodinger attempted, and failed (as did Einstein), to forge a unified field theory, but he did write a bizarre and wonderful book entitled ''What Is Life?'' in which he was the first to suggest that a chromosome is nothing more than a message written in code. The book inspired at least two young scientists to seek careers in biology - James Watson and Francis Crick, who eventually were given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding DNA.

Schrodinger never accomplished his greatest dream, to reinstate classical physics with its almost Vedantic continuity over the lumpiness of quantum mechanics. Perhaps as a revenge against his quantum enemies, he did leave behind a paradox that torments scientists to this day. The paradox of Schrodinger's cat links the squishy quantum microworld, with its statistical probabilities that replace cause and effect, to the Newtonian macroworld of everyday objects that obey hard-and-fast rules of causality. Put a cat in a box, Schrodinger said, with a flask of lethal acid. In a Geiger tube, place a small quantity of radioactive material, so little that in the course of an hour one atom has a 50-50 chance of disintegrating, setting off the Geiger counter, which will trigger a hammer that shatters the flask of acid that will kill the cat. So, after one hour is the cat dead or alive? Schrodinger said that if one used the quantum wave function to describe the entire system, ''the living and the dead cat'' would be ''smeared out (pardon the expression) in equal parts.'' Schrodinger intended his paradox as a sarcastic comment on quantum probability or ''blurred variables.'' One can resolve the uncertainty, he explained, by looking in the box.

Schrodinger himself, however, must always remain somewhat blurred, despite Walter Moore's heroic efforts in this important book about the century's most enigmatic scientist. For the average reader, ''Schrodinger'' may be tough going, but it serves up a wonderfully frank and unglamorized, albeit narrow, history of the development of quantum mechanics. Much of the science in this book is only opaquely explained, but explaining science is not the book's main function. It is an attempt to analyze a soul, and in that respect, it surpasses even ''The Double Helix'' by James Watson in its examination of the most visceral drives of a great scientist.