Erwin Schrodinger honored with Google Doodle
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger is being honored today with a Google Doodle. Schrodinger is most famous for his eponymous equation on quantum wave mechanics, for which he earned the Nobel Prize in 1933, but his name is most often associated with a thought experiment involving a cat.
The doodle pays homage to that experiment, known today as "Schrodingers cat." The experiment posed the question of how quantum mechanics applies to everyday objects, and countered conventional thinking of the time. He asked, can a cat at once be alive and dead, existing in both states simultaneously?
Born in Vienna in 1887, Schrodinger earned his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1910 before serving several years in the military. After World War I, he took a teaching post in Vienna. By 1925, he was a professor of physics at the University of Zurich, where he completed much of his renowned work in quantum physics.
Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Schrodinger worked at universities across Europe, including a stint alongside Albert Einstein at the University of Berlin. While working in Dublin, he authored the 1944 quantum mechanics book "What is Life?" He lost a lifelong battle with tuberculosis in 1961. Today would mark his 126th birthday.
