Google doodle honours scientist Erwin Schrodinger on 126th birthday

“The cat is both dead and alive.”

The statement encapsulates the theory behind Erwin Schrödinger thought experiment. Today is the scientist’s 126th birthday, and he is being honoured by Google with a doodle representing this experiment, which has become one of his most famous contributions to science.

The doodle shows a living cat emerging from a box, even as a ghostly white cat with crosses for eyes rises out of the other end of the box. It was somewhere around 1935 that Schrodinger, after extensive discussions and correspondence with the Theory of Relativity genius, Albert Einstein, developed his now famous Schrodinger’s Cat Theorem. The experiment is explained thusly by Wikipedia :

“a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If… the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.”

And of course, Twitter with its quips wasn’t far behind Google.

If the concept is a little hard to understand, check out this Youtube video from Open University which uses jokes and cartoons to explain the concept: